


Portrait of Monsieur X

by brigitttt



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: (as slow as 3 chapters of burn is though), Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - Historical, Eventual Happy Ending, Flirting, Inspired by Art, M/M, Oral Sex, Painting, Poetry, Slow Burn, The scandal is NOT homophobia btw, background Jokaste/Kastor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:33:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27046525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigitttt/pseuds/brigitttt
Summary: "Without moving, Laurent spoke. “I wonder how long it takes for a portrait to become something different than its subject,” he said quietly. Damen wondered if this was a question he was truly meant to answer."It's the 1890s and Damen is hired to paint Laurent's portrait. A fic with guilt, ruin, and love.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 84
Kudos: 109





	1. Partie Un. La flamme

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, thank you very much to thatgothlibrarian (jay <3) for encouraging and helping and enabling (this is dedicated to you). 
> 
> If it wasn't obvious from the title, this is inspired by the "scandal" surrounding John Singer Sargent's painting of Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau), but only loosely follows those events. Please do look up the history, it's very intriguing!
> 
> Not exactly sure when I'll be posting the next two chapters, but this work will definitely be completed, don't worry. Enjoy :))

The Académie des Beaux-Arts in Arles is absolutely stifling despite the chill in the air in the surrounding parks, and Damen wishes with increasing desperation that he could loosen his bow tie by a centimeter, a millimeter, a hair’s breadth. For such a supposedly “private” viewing, the opening night is packed with patrons; Damen dazedly imagines the silk skirts of all the finely dressed Veretian ladies brushing together with enough pressure to start smoking, sending off sparks. He hides his smile behind a cough just as he spies the Gautreau family entering through the east doors, a tall quartet of matching blondes. 

Damen’s sightline is obscured by the rest of the mingling patrons, but he catches glimpses of them as they progress through the crowd; three tophats clutched elegantly to three slim flanks, a fine ivory glove perching on the vicomte’s forearm, a strong hand subtly adjusting the pin in an ascot tie. Then, a jawline, pale with lavender powder that, in the past weeks, Damen had found accidentally smudged on a table surface, a stray cushion, the sleeve of his own painter’s apron. He has only a moment to absentmindedly push away a stubborn curl from his forehead before he is set upon by the luxury of their presence.

“Ah, the artist himself,” Vicomte Gautreau announces grandly, dislodging his wife’s arm from his own. Damen gives a humble smile and a slight bow, a mumbled ‘ _monsieur_ ’. “You’ve met my son Auguste, no?”

“Yes, I have, good evening. And this must be the lovely Madame la Vicomtesse?” Damen is offered a gloved hand and hears a smooth ‘ _enchanté_ ’ as he brushes close to the knuckles. 

Auguste poses a question to his father in a light tone, something about drinks, but the din of the salon seems to subside when Damen finally turns to greet the subject of his creative passion for the last month. His suit is not quite black, but an immensely deep midnight blue that makes his face appear like the moon above, serene and bright. There’s something about his eyes that makes one feel as if they’re being let in on a secret, every time he speaks.

“Laurent,” Damen says, tongue thick in his mouth. His grip tightens awkwardly on his top hat.

“I believe we’ve met, perhaps once or twice before,” Laurent says with a quirk of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and the vicomtesse laughs daintily at her son’s side. Damen breathes out and indulges in a smile, and leads the way to the next room. 

There’s a hesitancy that buoys up as soon as Damen sees the gilt of the large frame on the dark wall, assembled in between so many other paintings. The crowd of the salon has condensed in front of it, and Damen dares a look to Laurent beside him. He looks as calm and contained as ever, a self-assurance which Damen feels so lacking in at the moment. His pace slows as they quietly approach the edge of the crowd, and doesn’t dare look up at his own painting. He’s suddenly and frantically sure that Laurent must be able to hear the quickened beats of his heart, and then, he hears the crowd.

“It’s practically depraved. A Veretian artist would never have–” from one madame, and “How could they agree to show this at a gathering of, ah, intellectuals of society–” from the man in front of them, and “Well, I never! Although I did hear that that young son of the vicomte, well–” and “Something scandalous portrayed so flippantly, surely the family didn’t know what that Akielon was–” and “–affair–” and “–disgrace–” and, and, and.

Someone turns and gasps behind their fan, and like an ocean’s wave the twitter of ladies stills momentarily only to wash back in over the parquet beaux-arts floor. Damen’s cheeks are heating up at all the eyes on him, and how could he have known? Was there a moment in the process of sketching that curve of jaw, that sweep of ice blond hair, the drape of his sleeve, in which Damen had taken too much of something? Had he been too selfish, had he told a lie with the oils, the colours, the light? 

He turns to Laurent in time to see an unidentifiable expression briefly cross his face, only to be replaced with the carefully constructed delineations of a reserved member of high society; something in Damen’s lungs stutters and he takes an involuntary step back, glancing at the vicomtesse’s hardening look, and then the stern face of the vicomte. Damen tries to swallow past the lump in his throat, and feels a tug on his jacket sleeve. He looks down.

“There won’t be a scene here, naturally,” Laurent says, low enough that only Damen could hear him. He’s not looking away from the portrait. “However, I think it best if you discreetly take your leave.” 

Laurent shifts imperceptibly towards his mother’s side, away from Damen, and Damen tries to think of anything to say that might make this better, might persuade away from their interpretation of his work, but the look that Laurent gives him, a spark of blue from the corner of his eye, shuts Damen’s fluttering mouth. 

When he can finally make his way through the packed galleries and exit the building, even the dark of the night cannot chill the flushed heat in his skin.

\---

Twenty-six years ago in a small town in the south of Akielos, Damianos Theomedou was born, and eight years after, he had learned to love painting. 

His mother had died upon his birth, but he had been told by his father that he was very much like her, in looks and demeanour alike. There had been a miniature of her on the mantel that seemed to survey the small sitting room and the kitchen table, and the portrait could even be seen from the back of the garden through the kitchen doors, a little speck of glinting yellow. As a child, Damen had weaved through past the rosemary bushes to stand with his back to the gnarled little oak tree and hold his hands out to form a frame, capture with his mind’s eye the back of the house, the sunlight streaked across the plaster and roof tiles, with his mother’s distant face at the centre of it all.

The opposite would happen too, of course; his older brother would have to hover beside him to make sure it wouldn’t be dropped while Damen turned the portrait and its frame over and over in his clumsy child hands, then hold it so close to his eyes as to turn everything dark. Sometimes when Kastor wasn’t there, he’d take it carefully over to the kitchen doors to see it in the sun, try to distinguish every individual stroke of paint. 

He had received art lessons after much insistence, and sat down for the next decade with the old man in the tall, narrow house in town to learn about charcoal and graphite and pastels, form and texture and light. Anatomy had been one entire month of looking in a mirror in his own shirtsleeves and figuring out through touch and sight how an arm attaches to a shoulder, how a leg turns out, which muscles have to strain and relax in turn. Damen had captured in watercolours and oil many plates of lemons and glasses of water and drapes of curtains, and near the end of it all he’d been invited to paint his own teacher’s face. 

If Damen had the inclination to ever tell the story, he would describe the process of painting a face like peeling an orange. Thumbnail under the pith, easing away the skin, getting the fragrance on your hands, piece by piece until you have a meal. It had felt so simple to him to look at a face he had looked at for years as a student, and then to draw a version of it that felt like a true statement, easy as breathing. 

His teacher had commended Damen on his brushstrokes and colour, and then told him to slash the canvas. “A true artist learns to let go of things,” he had said, and then handed Damen a knife, the grip already warm in his hand.

Damen had gone on to do many more portraits over the years, first for friends and then, by way of his charm at social events, for members of the Ios higher class. He had only painted for the south of Akielos by the time he’d learned, through channels of other Akielon artist groups, that the real goal of an aspiring professional painter should be the Salon in Arles. “Although,” one landscape painter had said to him, “everyone forgets how Vere does not give chances to Akielons. A countryman might as well show his neck to a lion.”

It was surprising, then, to receive the letter. An aide to the Vicomte de Belloy had wished to seek Damen’s skills as a portrait artist, for the younger son of his employer, and that the family would pay considerably (and up front). Damen had pictured a bratty child in a richly frilled coat, unable to sit still, but then had also pictured the money in his coffer and replied back with an overly polite acceptance. 

By the time Damen had taken the boat over the border and then the coach into Arles, he had become simultaneously exhausted with the hassles of the entire world, and lively, sparking with excitement for this excellent opportunity. A studio in the city had been generously acquired for the month by the family for the necessary sittings; Damen had wondered why they might take a child all the way into the city when he could just as easily bring himself to the no doubt more comfortable country estate, but dared not question his certainly fortuitous circumstances. Regardless, all became clear on the first of October.

The “younger son” proved to be well out of childhood, closer to twenty than anything Damen had been imagining. He’d strolled into the studio as if he knew exactly what was expected of him, and was determined to let the world realise that he knew something better. Damen had been struck a little too dumb to do anything but gape and then belatedly and hastily offer a handshake and a bow to the vicomte, and then to his model-to-be. 

“How gracious,” the son had said, in a tone more curious than mocking, and then stated his name. _Laurent Gautreau_. It was a name that felt lazy to say, that forced a slowness to Damen’s tongue as he traversed the vowels, much like the way one has to pause mid-bite into a baklava dripping with honey. 

Monsieur le Vicomte had looked around the studio – a high-ceilinged space with large southern-facing windows and paint marks on the wood floor from previous renters – and raised his chin. “I have time to sit in for this initial session, but I expect the process of portraiture will be less productive to watch than performing the duties of my title. My son will be chaperoned by someone else, next time,” he said coolly. Damen envied him his confidence that the matter would be sorted out by someone else and yet still conform to his exact specifications. 

Cautiously at first, and then with increasing surety, Damen explained how he would spend the first sessions sketching studies, that before trying to decide on a final image he should first learn how to draw Laurent faithfully, in any pose. He had taken the answering silence as acceptance.

Despite the size of the windows the studio was not cold, and yet Laurent had not shed a single layer of his clothes for the whole hour, apart from his hat, which sat stiffly on the divan. Damen had sketched the black silhouette of the coat and trousers like he was drawing a fashion plate, and Laurent took his time in a steady stroll around the room, inspecting each of its contents with a detached gaze until coming to rest on the divan for the last twenty minutes. His father had merely settled on the second couch and alternately pinned his attention on the movements of Damen’s hand over the paper and his son.

When the time was up, the vicomte made a show of checking his pocketwatch and announced that he would get the coach ready. Only when Damen had finished the last strokes of charcoal did he utter a thanks to him, before realizing that there was only a smirking Laurent left in the studio. He traipsed over to Damen’s stool in the same consistent walk he had used for his tour and came around behind to view the sketches.

“To your taste?” Damen had asked. He couldn’t peel his eyes away from the rosiness on Laurent’s cheeks, just visible under a light layer of powder.

Laurent had tilted his head, causing a strand of hair to fall away from where it had been pushed back. “Yes, I think it must be,” he said with a slight smile, and the cuff of his coat had brushed over Damen’s shoulder just barely as Laurent made to leave the room.

\---

The first thing that Damen does when he gets back home is walk straight to the mantel. He clutches to his chest the one bag of belongings he had been able to pack from the Arles studio in the short amount of time between the Salon opening and the end-of-week sailing down the coast, and stares at the place where the miniature of his mother’s face should be.

“You’re back already?” Kastor says from behind him, the archway to the kitchen. “I thought it was for a month, or–”

“Where is it,” Damen says instead of answering. He feels Kastor approach, doesn’t want to lose sight of the conspicuous outline of dust on the mantel.

Kastor claps a hand on Damen’s shoulder and peers over. “Where’s what? Oh, the portrait. Well, I showed it to Elisabet because she was curious–”

Damen clenches his eyes shut on instinct. “Don’t tell me it’s broken, Kastor, I can’t bear it–”

“ _And_ , she wanted very much to keep it safe in her room. It’s just on her vanity, no need to get up in arms, Damen.” Kastor brings a calloused hand to Damen’s cheek, and he opens his eyes. Damen can feel the words ‘ _it’s just a painting_ ’ flow between their skin and forces himself to take a slow breath through his nose.

“Fine,” he says, and Kastor drops his hand, flashes him a grin. Damen grimaces into the tight hug, his bag still held awkwardly between them at chest height.

“Let me take that. Are you staying? At least for dinner, eh?”

Damen lets himself be corralled into a kitchen chair, arms now empty, and thinks hazily of nothing in particular. It feels like there’s nothing in his body at all, no organs or bones, just mist gathered in the spaces left behind. He idly recalls the dismissal he received from the Gautreau family via express-delivered letter, the precise and impassive cursive neatly informing him of his abominable Akielon transgressions. He wishes he could have had a day to explain, but likely the opportunity would only serve to confuse and further implicate himself. He thinks of the day Laurent had stood in front of a mirror. He wishes he had not accepted the commission.

He wishes his niece was not so curious, but knows that that’s absurd to ask of a child, hypocritical of him to restrict the admiration of something that really is, just a painting. He’ll inevitably be invited up to her room this evening regardless, and he can see it then.

His father is surprised when he gets home late from the church, but doesn’t make a fuss of it, only gathers Damen in his arms and kisses his forehead. He gasps and says very quickly, “The portrait of your mother, do not worry,” but Damen shushes him, gives him a shaky smile.

Elisabet and her mother Jokaste arrive shortly after with dishes from the generous yia-yia Gerotsis down the street, bundling into the house in a comfortable racket, shouts of “Papa, we’re home!” and “Yia-yia made up kokinisto and rizogalo for us, and said there was someone here? Oh!”

Damen is quick to hitch Elisabet up into his arms, even though she’s gotten a little big for it, and receives a smacking kiss on each cheek in her excitement. He calls her Liyabeta and asks about her day and ignores the look he knows Jokaste is trying to give him from the entranceway. Her looks have always been piercing like that, and he’s not sure that he could withstand one right now. He feels too insubstantial already to risk being cut through with her sharp mind, straight to the reason he’s already back home and not reveling in riches in Vere, so he bounces Elisabet in his arms to hear her laugh and then goes to wash up for dinner.

The meal conversation is taken up with regular family matters, to Damen’s relief; Kastor talks about his day in the barrister’s office, the endless paperwork and legal matters, while Jokaste comments on the information she heard from the wife of one of the other lawyers. Their father is retired but helps out at the church most days, and explains the intricacies of repairing the off-tune organ. Elisabet squirms in her seat, spoon grasped more for wild gesticulation than for the transport of food, and exclaims upon the various dramas with her friend Yiorgos from the next street over. Damen is more than amenable to sitting back, savouring the sweetness of his rizogalo, and forgetting about Vere. 

Unfortunately, yet not unexpectedly, Kastor goes upstairs to escort Elisabet into bed, and Damen is descended upon. 

“News doesn’t travel quite as fast between Vere and Akielos as people do,” Jokaste proposes, rather judiciously. She takes a sip of her wine and waits, letting the statement hang. Damen deposits his own glass on the table and leans his head back as far as it will go.

“The portrait,” Damen starts, and then doesn’t know how to explain it, not the feelings, not the events, certainly not the painting itself. Jokaste allows him a full minute to attempt to gather some semblance of an explanation, and likely exchanges knowing looks with his father.

“The portrait,” Jokaste repeats. “Was awful. Was magnificent. Was in some hesitant space between those two adjectives. Do any of those apply?”

“The last one,” Damen groans softly, lifting his head for a drink. “The portrait was as awful as it was magnificent. It was terrible and beautiful.”

“Sounds like some compliments I’ve received,” says Jokaste, and his father snorts.

“The family, the boy,” his father joins. “They didn’t like it? But they did pay you?”

Damen takes another gulp of wine. Always expect his father to ask the important questions. “The b– the, uh, boy,” he stumbles, unsure of how to refer to Laurent but certain the right phrase is not as innocent and young as ‘the boy’. “He seemed to like it. The family probably would have liked it, had not the entire aristocratic population of Arles vehemently _dis_ liked it.” Damen sighed, and then said, “They paid me. Is this inquisition finished?”

Jokaste tilts her head and purses her lips once Damen looks at her. She used to do that back when there was something possible between them, when Damen was nineteen and would look at her every chance he got. She always had to make sure that she had the right amount of audience before making a statement, verbal or not. It used to attract him, to be the focus of her particularly observational attention, but now it just makes him tired. He steels himself for the finely-tuned bite of her insight.

Except Kastor galumphs down the stairs just at that moment, saying that Elisabet wants a kiss from her uncle, and that Damen had better go do what the little princess requests of him before all chance of sleep gets upended. Damen greedily takes his escape.

“Liyabeta-Exalted,” he whispers, kneeling at her bedside. “This knight has come to deliver that which the princess most desires,” he says, and then bites down on his lip to keep from laughing when her eyes widen and she gasps out, “A pony!” 

“Alas, please keep this kiss as promise to acquire a pony in due course,” Damen says quickly, and leans over towards her forehead. He adjusts the knitted quilt on top of her other blankets and pretends to hammer down nails where the blanket covers her shoulders, making her giggle at him to stop.

Before he leaves, Damen stops at her little vanity desk to look at the miniature. It’s been surrounded with small picked flowers, mostly dandelions, and he smiles at the loving care a young granddaughter has for a portrait of a woman she’s never met. He catches his own eye in the mirror of the vanity then, and just stares, as if he’s studying for a portrait of his own. He almost expects to look like a different person, yet everything is the same; he tries to tilt his head to find where there must be something changed, and only serves to make him look like one of Jokaste’s expressions. Damen slips out the door and down to his room in silence.

\---

Laurent arrived with a much younger version of his father for the second sitting, who turned out to be his older brother, Auguste. He had a glowing smile and a handshake for Damen, and then rapidly and exuberantly explained that he had an appointment a couple blocks over that will take up the most of a couple hours, but will endeavour to return no doubt before three. He ruffled Laurent’s hair as he took his leave, to which Laurent rebutted with a glare and a rude hand gesture. 

“He’s visiting a girl,” Laurent said, all comfortable matter-of-fact. “Presumably in secret, although it seems increasingly less likely that such a state will hold for long.” Damen, wide-eyed from the whirlwind, nodded, and took Laurent’s hat and gloves, and then realised he had nowhere to put them but the sofa. He moved toward his stool and easel, but paused at the sound of heavy fabric being deposited haphazardly onto the furniture. 

Laurent was in the middle of unbuttoning his suit jacket, his overcoat folded over the back of the sofa, and raised his eyebrows at what must be a ridiculous expression of confusion on Damen’s face, half-turned around in curiosity. 

“You couldn’t expect me to parade around in front of my father and the Akielon he barely trusts, wearing any less clothing than full coat, gloves and hat,” Laurent said. 

“You . . .” said Damen, his mouth initially refusing to form words, thinking only of how Laurent had definitely taken off his hat. He shook his head slightly. “I had thought you must have been boiling, last time,” he said.

Laurent let out a dry laugh. “Indeed, I was. Now, Damianos,” he said, adjusting his sleeve cuffs. “How shall you have me?”

Damen garbled out an indistinct noise of exclamation, apparently something which Laurent fully expected to happen, and collected himself enough to pick up his charcoal and start a sketch. As a warm-up, it came together roughly; the suggestion of Laurent with his hands in his trouser pockets, unbuttoned jacket bunching under his arms, tie cinched comfortably under his short collar, nose straight, jaw slightly dropped in order to say– 

“May I ask of your intentions for this piece?”

Damen glanced back up at Laurent, drawing his hand away from the paper. He thought for a minute before answering, taking the time to smudge in the darkness of the trousers. 

“A portrait is meant to capture a single moment of a person,” Damen said carefully. “I suppose I wish to capture a single moment of– well, you.” He averted his eyes at the last second. Something about the way Laurent looked at him made Damen feel flayed and exposed, just like Jokaste’s occasional looks except with many more embers flickering underneath, hot to the touch. When he dared to look back, Laurent had tilted his head, still gazing at Damen.

“I see,” Laurent said simply. He seemed to come to a sort of conclusion in his mind, and then came around to sit on the sofa, perched to the side so that Damen faced him in profile. The silence in the space between them begged to be filled, but neither of them said a word except for Damen asking if Laurent wanted tea, and Laurent responding in the negative. By the end of the last forty-five minute sketch, Laurent had propped his elbow on the sofa-back, and his chin on his hand, eyes closed and legs relaxed. Damen wished desperately not to disturb him, and so added little studies of details around the sketch: the curve of Laurent’s wrist and hand where it lay on his lap, the glint of his shoes in the light from the window, the touch of his eyelashes against his cheek. 

Without moving, Laurent spoke. “I wonder how long it takes for a portrait to become something different than its subject,” he said quietly. Damen wondered if this was a question he was truly meant to answer, but attempted anyway.

“That may depend on the artist,” he said, standing from his stool and walking over to the supply table to lay his charcoal down. He heard Laurent hum and smeared his dusty hands on his apron. “How much of the truth one is willing to tell.”

“Ahh,” Laurent said, as if he’d discovered something new and usable. Damen sat back on the edge of the table to face him. Laurent had opened his eyes, chin jutted forward on his hand. “Suppose the portrait was never meant to tell the truth in the first place. What then?”

“Then . . . not very long,” Damen said, shrugging. Then, with sudden resolve, “I hope you do not wish me to paint you as a lie, monsieur. You may have hired the wrong artist if such is the case.”

“No, not at all,” said Laurent, finally lifting his head and staring straight at Damen, a certain gravity in his eyes. “I wish you to paint me as an unequivocal truth. You have my word.”

Auguste returned shortly after, taking a short look around the studio from the doorway as if confirming that his duties as chaperone had been upheld despite his lack of presence. Damen stood in front of the day’s sketches for a long while that evening, wondering where his mind had gone to be so entranced by his own work.

The next sessions took on much the same format: the initial swift departure of Auguste, the casual flirtation of a disrobing Laurent – “Perhaps I should take off another layer this time, Damianos?” – the simmering silence of two hours of sketching, whereupon Laurent would fall into an increasingly lax posture, the gentle beginning of a conversation, sometimes to do with art – “How does one recreate in paint the likeness of velvet? Of linen?” – and sometimes not – “I’ve heard that there is a powerful Akielon liquor that is distilled in people’s very own homes,” – bookended by the reappearance of a freshly tousled Auguste. 

Damen was helpless to the rhythm of it, producing sketch after sketch, moving from charcoal to graphite to watercolour, each study simultaneously a greater likeness to his subject, and a clearer display of Damen’s growing infatuation with him. Here was a man who held himself with the utmost care for his own image, and yet that image was not and could never be the kind of vanity so perpetuated in society. Laurent was smart and powerful and beautiful, a man with a ruthless sense of self, and so very unafraid. 

The fact that Damen was contracted to make his portrait was almost secondary to the captivating task of remarking every detail of his face, his clothes, his posture. Damen would catch himself thinking that Laurent was made to be painted, that he deserved to be seen, as he had said, in his truest form. 

“What will you call the portrait?” Laurent asks in one session. He was sitting on the sill of the window, so that half of his face and body were caught in abrupt shadow. 

Damen bit his lip and re-drew the line of a tendon in his neck before saying, “Would Portrait of Monsieur Gautreau be too mundane?”

Laurent huffed. “It certainly would. There should be some intrigue, some mystery to it, don’t you think?”

Damen refrained from sighing at the sudden turning of Laurent’s head, losing the angle of the cheekbone he was working on. “There is no mystery to a portrait when the subject is so well-known,” he said. 

“That is precisely why the title should be mysterious, so that one reads the title and is intrigued, and yet is pleasantly surprised to see the, as you say, well-known subject upon viewing.” 

Damen put down his pencil and looked at him with a quirk of a smile. “You already have a title in mind, don’t you, so let’s hear it.”

Laurent smiled back, a brightening thing. “We shall call it,” he said, and then paused for effect. “‘ _Monsieur X_ ’.”

\---

Damen thinks of Laurent suddenly, inconveniently, and slightly bitterly. 

He will be in the kitchen of Yia-yia Gerotsis to sketch and keep her company, and will idly imagine what Laurent might think of the lamb she’s marinating, how knobbly her old hands are as she kneads bread dough. He will be out in the sun of the market square to keep watch over Elisabet and pick up some vegetables and will find himself wondering how Laurent’s hair might glint gold, how the back of his neck might pink, if his collar was let loose. He will be in the middle of sketching somebody else’s portrait, and figure in the breadth of Laurent’s shoulders instead of his model’s. It grates on him each time he has to dispel the thought of Laurent, forcibly assert himself to the present circumstances. After a month to recover his pride, Damen could at least be granted freedom from this particular devil, ever-present at the back of his mind. 

The art he makes now seems less-than, too. No matter how long he takes to study his subject, or adjust his sketch, or re-paint a detail, nothing will ever compare to the magnificence of _Monsieur X_ , how very near to perfection Damen had reached. There are nights when he lies in bed, eyes closed, and thinks of the feeling of each brushstroke again like silk velvet under his hand. When he drifts off to sleep, sometimes Damen dreams of Monsieur X turning to look out of the frame at him, and walking away, Laurent’s footsteps fading into the ticking of the clock.

Does Laurent feel the same grudging pain, Damen wonders. Is he able to look at a painting in a salon and not feel a little cut on the inside. Can he take off his hat and coat, slip a thumb under his braces, and not remember sitting in the studio; can he ride in an open carriage through the park with his mother and admire the turning of autumn into winter, completely unaffected by– 

It hits him in the middle of playing whist with Jokaste, late in the evening, Kastor outside in the garden with a cigarette and their father up in bed already. Jokaste lays down a seven of spades and Damen says, “It hurt him too.”

“Pardon?” says Jokaste dryly, flicking her eyes up from her hand and raising an eyebrow. Damen blinks, unseeing, at the cards in his hands.

“I forgot all about it,” he says, and Jokaste looks up to the heavens, gestures with a hand, tiredly says “Play your card, Damen,” as if to stall the incoming tide.

“The public’s reception of a painting always affects the painter,” Damen says. “Yet the reception of a _portrait_ affects not only the painter but also the subject! He must be so– oh no–” During this realization Damen has rearranged the drinks on the table, clearing a space to lay down his cards. 

“Has it really only just occurred to you? Oh dear,” says Jokaste with a sigh. She reaches over the table for one of his flailing hands. “Damen, I know you are unfortunately still upset over the absolute disaster of your salon debut. However, the slight easing you have managed to acquire to soothe the pain of such a remarkable debacle,” – Damen frowns, which she ignores – “is far more than that man will ever gain, for he cannot simply take a boat back to Ios and the comforts of both his sister-in-law’s cleverness, and Yia-yia Gerotsis’ beef stew.” She drops his hand, and picks up her glass of wine, taking a long, slow sip.

Damen reels his hand back to his lap and stares in consternation at the weave of the tablecloth. Without saying a word, he huffs and lays down a card at random, silently conceding to Jokaste’s point. For all that he had been so disgruntled thinking that Laurent would manage to dodge the portrait’s wreck, realizing the opposite makes him feel no better either. He plays the rest of their game in a haze of embarrassment and guilt, the kind of smoke that lingers long after the flame has gone out. Jokaste wins and takes the last of his abandoned wine as her prize, then fits her hand to his cheek with a knowing look.

He spends a solemn three weeks without any work, and takes the free time to try his hand at a miniature of each of his family members. He starts with his father, who sits outside in the shade of the house one afternoon, his eyes closed and face tilted back on the wicker chair. The resulting portrait is a calm tableau of a man delightedly at rest, and thus quite atypical; more of a miniature of what Damen might regularly paint, rather than a miniature featuring a person’s bright and alert face, easily and immediately recognizable. 

Jokaste catches him with his gouaches only the next day, and after a pleasant and slightly patronising smile, insists that her own miniature be painted next. Damen lets her choose her own surroundings, and follows her into the study, the chair rearranged in front of the south-facing window. Damen manages to capture the right amount of wit to the quirk of her lips, but feels that the miniature’s eyes do not quite live up to the sharpness of the real thing. She’s pleased nonetheless, and promises to have the whole set framed once Damen finishes painting the rest of the family.

The next week, Damen is able to persuade Kastor to stay at the table after a dinner one night, and sets his palette and paints out with haste. The miniature finds Kastor lit softly by lamplight, arms crossed and head partially turned down and away. Once she’s finished putting Elisabet to bed, Jokaste comes to stand behind Damen as he finishes the last strokes. When he glances up in distraction, he witnesses the gentling of her expression as she tries to catch her husband’s eyes.

Elisabet is ecstatic to have her own portrait done, but the preparation of such a momentous occasion requires several days of personal artistic decisions before she deigns to let Damen into her room with his paints. She perches primly on the seat in front of the vanity with a handmade chain of daisies standing in for where she makes Damen promise to put a tiara in his finished work. Damen agrees to all her demands with utmost sincerity, and when the miniature is done – quickly sketched and carefully painted in only fifteen minutes beyond her twenty-minute capacity for sitting still – he lets her look with her hands delicately held behind her back while it starts to dry. She gleams and squirms into his arms when he sets it down on the vanity, and while he hugs her to his chest, he can’t help but smile at the little dot in the background behind Elisabet: the bare wisp of his mother’s own portrait.

It is at the end of this quiet three-week period when Damen hears of Laurent. He hadn’t realized he’d forgotten a little about everything until the sudden resurfacing of that name, too distracted with his miniature project to remember why he had needed a distraction in the first place. Regardless, he hears it from one of the ladies in town, while on errands with Jokaste, that a young Veretian socialite had taken refuge in his estate in Acquitart after a scandalising of his reputation at the Arles Salon, the young son of one of those lords, a viscount or something, don’t you know, well they say he’d taken a lowly Akielon lover! Just like those nasty Veretians to blame it on one of us, _hmph_. Jokaste had nodded and hummed, and changed the subject without even the briefest of glimpses at Damen. On their walk home, she had threaded her arm through his elbow and smoothed the hair on his forearm with a steady hand. 

\---

Even when it was not yet halfway complete, and Damen could not help but admire his own work. The carefully pale hands, the drape of the sleeves, the cords of the neck as the head turned away – it was all so enthralling, and looking at one part of the portrait only encouraged the eyes to search out more. He could already see through the rough parts to what the finished product would be like, smooth and detailed, a piercing portrait of indifferent detachment. 

Although he no longer truly required Laurent to sit in as a model, Damen still let him come to the studio. He had started bringing books to read while he sat in the light of the window, and occasionally Damen would find himself bringing out scrap paper to sketch on, unsatisfied with simply viewing the scene, compelled to record it somehow. Perhaps he would have enough studies to compose a whole second portrait, completely from memory. 

For Damen, it had taken most of the month to begin to admit that he might like to run his own palms across the breadth of Laurent’s shoulders, feel the muscles of his chest and thighs. The problem with admitting that one’s feelings are merely infatuation is that it becomes harder to divorce those feelings from his mind with his painting subject present so frequently; forcing one’s self to take note of every beautiful and engaging thing about a person will inevitably result in some amount of interest. However, Damen couldn’t help but read into even the smallest of Laurent’s gestures towards him, hoping to catch how these futile feelings might be returned. 

One day, Laurent had taken out a compact mirror and applied his lavender powder in the middle of the session. Plumes of dust had circulated in a halo around him, and when he’d caught Damen’s eye he had smirked, set the compact down haphazardly on top of his dark coat – so expensive, now no doubt smudged with powder – and advanced upon Damen with the brush. ‘ _Would you care for some?_ ’ he had said, with a tilt to his smile, and Damen had blushed and forgotten all his Veretian, so just tilted his cheek towards Laurent. As he’d applied a playful dusting to Damen’s cheeks, Laurent had glanced at the painting, in it’s half-finished state, some bare canvas still visible. He had considered it all with a shrewd eye, and then softly exclaimed, ‘ _There. Now we all match,_ ’ gesturing in the space between Damen, himself, and the portrait. After, Damen had found the little mirror in the adjoining studio washroom and regarded himself curiously, his dark skin blotched with two bright patches. It had been easy enough to swipe a cloth over his face and remove any trace.

At the very end of the month, the opening of the salon looming on the horizon, Damen stood in front of the finished piece with Laurent, wondering how anyone might choose to focus on the painting when they had the real thing in front of them. He looked at Laurent and told himself he was simply waiting to see his reaction. 

“Do you like me?” Laurent said suddenly from his side. Feeling fairly caught out, Damen took a half-step away from him, and then stilled as Laurent suddenly put his hand on Damen’s forearm, stalling his retreat. “If you saw the painting, I mean,” he said. “Would you look at it and like me?”

Damen narrowed his eyes, sure that Laurent was aware of how his words had been phrased. He left his arm underneath Laurent’s grip. “I think,” he said, and then stopped, bit his lip. “I think if I saw this painting – as one who had not painted it in the first place, of course –” and Laurent nodded along. “I would wonder more about your opinion of me than mine of you.”

“I see,” Laurent accepted with a tilt of his head. Damen could feel his touch like a brand on his arm now, but dared not move, desperate to keep the warmth there. Laurent’s fingers squeezed, and he looked up at Damen. “And what is the opinion that you would like me to have? Of you?”

He must know what he’s doing, Damen thought. He could not be as rich and vacant as he wanted everyone to believe, there was too much of a brightness behind those carefully observant eyes. Damen considered his answer with heat building on the back of his neck, a prickling sensation that one feels when on the edge of a precipice.

“I’d . . . I’d like for you to find me as someone whose presence is genuinely appreciated,” Damen said quietly, and he dared, with flame in his gut, to place his own hand atop of Laurent’s where it had still not moved. “Someone . . . desirable.”

Laurent’s dangerously neutral expression slipped into a sly smile that saw through to the molten core of Damen, and he took a step closer, the space between them dwindling to only a couple inches. He opened his mouth and Damen was about to hang himself on whichever words were about to be brought into existence, when Laurent’s gaze slid over Damen’s shoulder. His smile curved sharply on one side.

Laurent quietly sidestepped Damen – a strange image of a grey moth skittering over dark floorboards sprung to mind – and approached the half-shaded full-length mirror set to the side of the studio space. Damen was starkly reminded of the open buttons of Laurent’s collar, the white shirt framing the long tendons of his neck and watched as Laurent smoothed a pale hand down the front of it. He looked back at Damen through the mirror.

Damen felt he should speak but had no earthly idea of what to say, so he merely turned and came toward him, overly aware of the heaviness of his footsteps along the wooden floor. When he stood so that his chest was barely brushing Laurent’s back, his eyes first downcast at the crown of Laurent’s head, then locked with the unwavering blue of Laurent’s own gaze; when Damen stood in front of the mirror as he had stood for that month of anatomy study, now shielded by this man with a sharpness in his jaw and shoulders, roundness in his eyes, his cheeks; when Damen looked past Laurent’s eyeline and looked at the picture of them both, Laurent finally smiled, without any of the hints of untranslatable emotion, and twisted his hand up to cup Damen’s cheek.

“Perhaps,” he began softly, and then seemed to think better of it. Laurent’s finger drifted over to Damen’s lip. “The portrait will be a great success,” he said with more surety, and before Damen could do or say anything, Laurent twisted his body, turning away from the mirror in a quick motion to land a kiss on Damen’s mouth. Damen had just enough wherewithal to close his eyes and place a heavy hand around the back of Laurent’s shoulder blade, but before he could sink into the feeling of softness and warmth and urging on his lips, maybe even let loose the sound tucked in the back of his throat, Laurent shifted back. He sunk down too – he had been on his toes in order to kiss Damen, and the wrist that had been tucked under Laurent’s arm was now in Laurent’s gentle grip, easing apart from him. 

Damen felt gargantuan and lumbering, too big for his body, breathing far too heavily to still be any sort of attractive, and by the time he had a true handle on what had just happened, Laurent was just shrugging on his coat. There was a knock at the door, Auguste come to take his brother home for the last time.

\---

Damen is on the way back to the house with a crate of potatoes and a fresh fish for dinner when the boy comes running along, cap nearly flying off his head with the momentum.

“Damianos! Mr. Theomedou!” he says, waving one arm and digging in his sling bag with the other, frantic movements more for stopping a cart and horses than a single man laden with produce. The boy’s feet are dusty in the lane, shod with insubstantial sandals. 

He brandishes an envelope at Damen, which he currently does not have the hands to take. “Just lay it on top,” he says, and the boy perches the letter on top of the potatoes. “Thank you. There’s a copper piece in my left pocket,” he says, angling his hip. The boy brightens.

“All the way from Patras, Mr. Damen!” the boy exclaims of the letter as he retrieves the coin. Damen coos goodnaturedly over the pronouncement and wonders who this boy is to know all his names. The sandals swish away over the dusty stone down the street not a minute later.

He barely has time to wash his hands and face, let alone open the letter before he’s through the door and put to work by Jokaste. Her eyes widen greedily over the fish, and it’s such a comical sight that makes him laugh and acquiesce to ridding it of scales. He eyes the letter where it’s sitting on the front table, laying benignly on top of a lace doily, while he runs the back of the knife over the fish skin, over and over, wondering what’s inside. He doesn’t get a lot of mail, not even from his customers, and letters from family are always addressed to his father. It gets pushed out of his mind when Jokaste puts him in charge of chopping onions, and then carrots, and then he’s too tired to do much more before dinner than collapse into a chair outside, his father blowing cigar smoke into the setting sun.

The letter is retrieved at last on his way up to bed, close to midnight. Damen tears open the envelope in the middle of the hallway by candlelight, and reads the words inside once, then twice over. He makes it halfway through a third time before he rushes back down the stairs, foot skidding across the last step dangerously, propelling himself into the sitting room, over to Jokaste. She jolts a little with wide eyes at the sudden sight of him, and says “What’s all this?”

“A portrait in Patras, Jokaste! A commission for a portrait,” says Damen, offering the letter. Jokaste takes it, but doesn’t read it, first murmuring wondrously, “. . . in _Patras_ ,” while holding his gaze.

A moment later, in which Damen has run through nearly every thought of the travel and the accommodation and the sketches and the final portrait itself, Jokaste drops the letter to her lap and says, voice low, almost a command, “You have to take it.”

“I _know_ ,” says Damen, but Jokaste brings up a hand for attention.

“I mean it, Damen. This is too big to let go of.” Damen nods, and lowers himself to one knee in front of her chair. She grabs his hand. “You must do this well, and you must do this _right_ , this time.” 

Damen stills. He thinks of Laurent’s profile, of that moth-like, lavender powdered man of stone, and how an entire country had come to believe that somehow, Damen had been able to take anything from him. How an entire country could think that Damianos Theomedou managed to curse the poor, wretched, Laurent Gautreau with his only his oil paints.

“You will be brilliant, Damen,” Jokaste says firmly. “And you will be remembered for it.”

It is as if the next week of preparation flies by; Damen responds hastily with an acceptance, and arrangements for the coach up to the border, his heart racing with the excitement of it all. One moment he’s kissing his family goodbye on the steps of his home, and the next he’s approaching the capital of Patras, the tall tower domes covered in a late afternoon mist and yet still glowing and shining in the light refracted through. Damen collects his luggage and it’s as if every smell and sound and sight has been amplified by a thousand degrees. It’s nearly spring already, and the market he passes through is awash in fabrics of all colours, glinting jewels, cool clay vessels. Bells clink against each other at almost every stall, overlapping with shouts, haggling and laughter, a buoyant cacophony. It hits Damen from all sides, propels him along and through into the district where his accommodation is meant to be. He only has to ask for directions once, from a person with kohl-covered eyes and wearing a tasseled half-veil, who’d draped a hand over Damen’s shoulder and run their finger down the line of buttons on his shirt before describing the directions in a breathy, deep voice. Damen shakes his head with a smile at it all, the whole city and its thriving, pulsing innards, his home for the next month – or maybe even more. He blesses his sheer luck, and finds the key and the door for his new quarters right where he’d been told they’d be in the last letter. 

With a breathless laugh, Damen pushes open the door, impatient for his work to start, this brand new page of his career, and when his eyes adjust to the dimness of the front room, he suddenly finds– 

“Hello, lover,” Laurent says, turning from the bookshelf.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References in this chapter:  
> [Portrait of Madame X](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/12127)  
> [My own sketches](https://brigittttoo.tumblr.com/post/190874717543/captive-princejohn-singer-sargent-sketches-of) of what Damen's sketches of Laurent would look like, mirroring the real ones done by Sargent of Mme.G.


	2. Partie Deux. Les ruines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks all for your patience, some PhD stuff has been tough recently with ~*la pandémie~. Not entirely sure when the final chapter will be published but I only have two sections of it left to write, so barring any formidable and surprising life events, it should be relatively soon.

Almost twenty-two years ago, in the north of Vere, Laurent Gautreau was born, and immediately after, he was wrapped in a gold-threaded blanket, and presented to a gathering of the Gautreau family, several other Comtes, and his father’s close friend, the Dauphin de Vere. 

Wanting for absolutely nothing, Laurent hovered above the ground in his wet nurse’s, his nanny’s and occasionally, Maman’s arms for the first couple years of his life, finally set down to run after Auguste, only to be kept strictly out of his father’s office, private sitting room, and games lounge. One of his earliest memories was of holding one hand tightly onto Auguste’s, and the other on top of a window sill ledge, in order to peer through the glass and out onto the garden, awash in sunlight, and see someone sitting astride a deep chestnut horse, prancing delicately around a blossoming cherry tree. 

Five years old meant spending all his time in the library, compulsively reading and re-reading both his book of fairytales and his book of world adventures, tucked under a blanket on the plushly stuffed armchair in front of the reading desk. 

When Laurent was seven, they went to the palace in Arles for the Dauphin’s coronation to become King, and Laurent spent the entire time in the expansive church tugging on the tight collar of his new, unbearably stiff court suit. The year after, Maman had taken both Laurent and Auguste up north to her family’s country house in East Kempt, a very wooden building which had confused Laurent to no end, with its furs and bearskins and strangely designed doorways, all covered in patterns of red and black. His cousins had kept late nights with late dinners of reindeer meat and hard bread, dancing in circles to candlelight and country violin. 

At nine years old, Laurent stood nervously outside Maman’s door for an hour before finding out he had just lost a sister. His mother recovered with serene acceptance, stroking over Laurent’s fine hair where he buried his face in her neck, feeling his own breath warm the pillows. They added a small gravestone to the family plot, which Laurent snuck out to once with Auguste, in the very early hours of dawn, and they tramped over clumps of grass and hitched themselves up onto the stone wall where it was set into the natural rocky outcrop at the back of their Belloy estate. The pair of them had picked petals off of summer flowers, and fought swordfights with maple branches until the sun had risen high and they both became too hungry to rebel any further.

It was easy to look back on these early parts of his life with an impassive, almost golden kindness. He had had a childhood, a family, a future.

\---

“What are you doing here,” Damen grits out between clenched teeth. Laurent may have misjudged this part of his plan.

“For the portrait, same as you,” he says, trying to imbue a steady calmness to the atmosphere. Damen still hasn’t closed the door, only hovers in the entrance like he’s about to break the frame in his grip. “Just come inside and you’ll see,” says Laurent.

A series of primarily disgruntled expressions twist Damen’s face but he steps inside regardless, letting the door quietly shut. He eyes Laurent with blatant upset, with a hint of distrust, and Laurent immediately remembers how tiring it is to read every emotion on this man’s face. Tiring and guiltmaking. 

Damen holds a hand up to the pocket of his waistcoat, likely where he’s keeping the commission letter, and states with a furrowed brow, “You arranged this.”

“Yes,” Laurent says simply. 

“You have arranged many things before, haven’t you,” says Damen, mouth held tight. Laurent lays the book in his hand down on the little reading table; he should seem open and present for this, he thinks, for what’s done is done. There is no more need to be vague and aloof.

“If you’re saying that I have, in the recent past, constructed a situation with which to extricate myself from a – from my circumstances,” Laurent corrects, stumbling slightly. “Then yes. I arranged, as you say, _things_.”

Damen stares at him for a second more, hand still resting on his belly where the pocket is, and then breaks into a self-deprecating sort of scoff. “Right, of course.” He gestures narrowly to the floor, the space between them. “And is this more of the same construction? Further extrication?” Laurent opens his mouth but Damen carries on, clearly having found his momentum. “Perhaps I’m too Akielon to comprehend all the _circumstances_ , and _situations_ , and maybe even _states_ and, and–” Damen exclaims some Akielon words that are just more synonyms, “– but what I’m coming to understand is that, through your own excellent planning, I can no longer work in Vere. An entire country! Did you realise this too? Or was I merely an inconsequential variable in your calculations.”

Laurent lets out a breath through his nose and feels every hit, pound for pound. “I do realise, Damen. I couldn’t let you know that I was planning to do this to both of us. It would have been too risky, and I need you to perform as admirably as you have done.” Laurent gets the huff of annoyed disbelief from Damen that he was expecting. “You were never inconsequential. In fact, you played the most important role, and . . . for subjecting you to that, I am sorry.”

Damen has been directing his tough gaze to the wood parquet pattern of the floor, but finally looks up at the apology. Laurent would have looked away at the bookshelf or the door again if he wasn’t sure that such a gesture would convince Damen he was being impudent. He keeps his eyes on Damen’s, reminding him so abruptly of that month of studio sessions, always looking away from the artist’s gaze. The final portrait had been that way as well, Laurent’s face turned to the side, ready for his quiet exit. 

Some thought makes Damen’s lips purse for a fraction of a second, and then he’s dragging a chair out from the table, collapsing into it. Laurent dares a look past Damen’s shoulder out through the small window, wondering how soon the sun will set. Skipping past a true acknowledgement of the apology, Damen squares his shoulders again.

“So is there truly a commission? Or was this all just an elaborate–” 

“There really is a portrait,” Laurent says quickly. “A man here in Bazal, a merchant aristocrat. I met him on a trip, and– well, all that matters is, he wants to get a painting done before his wife spends all his new money.”

Damen tilts his head. He looks as if he’s gained ten years in the last five minutes. “Why?” he asks.

Laurent shakes his head with a laugh. “Wives like to spend money–”

“No, Laurent, why _me_?” Damen says. It’s the first time Laurent has heard his name from Damen’s mouth in a long while, and it surprises him to find how expectant he had been to hear it. Hiding this all with an adjustment of his lapel, Laurent clears his throat and minutely relaxes his stance.

“What do you want me to say, Damen?” Laurent tries a smile. “You do a splendid portrait.” 

An internal struggle appears on Damen’s face, mouth twisting, eyes looking down and away again. It might be a gamble, this approach; from their month together, Damen did not quite seem like a man who forgot or forgave easily, especially in the face of simple flattery. Laurent dares to take a step forward, but Damen doesn’t lift his head.

“I want you to be well-known,” Laurent starts, and then amends, “not from scandal but from talent, which you very much have. I want to put together a future for you, to grow from this, with opportunities in new countries. I want you to be all that you deserve.” 

Damen runs a hand up his forehead and through his curls, peeks an eye up at Laurent. “And what about what I want?” 

His eyes are so very dark, and Laurent’s heart stutters slightly. He holds out a hand. “What you _want_ , dear artist, is to paint. Don’t you?”

\---

He had always been better with books. 

Reading came so naturally and quickly for Laurent that a formal tutor was hired a year earlier than Auguste’s had been, and when Laurent was told this, he had held an expression of such self-satisfaction that the house staff highly suspected him of some sort of grand mischief for a whole week after. He had stepped proudly into the small study to meet his teacher, an aging man with a sweeping, large, dandy brush of a moustache, dressed in grey wools, and had declared that he could read any book presented to him. He was subsequently sat down at the table with a book of Archaic Veretian verbs, his confidence swirling down the drain along with _to fight_ , _to trade_ , _to rule_. 

Nevertheless, he did not succumb to this clear attempt at intimidation, and instead asked of his tutor, a couple months into his studies, to incorporate Archaic Akielon into his lessons as well, or else modern Vaskian, as he had not had time to learn that yet. His tutor had, with suspicion, sucked his top lip into his mouth which had bristled his moustache inconceivably further, and the day after next brought a book of Archaic Akielon. Laurent had started to beam with pride again.

Years later, a day like any other had started, except Laurent found within the study not his tutor, but Maman. She smiled at him in that small quirked way of hers and announced they were going on a special trip into Arles proper, to, as she had said, round out his education. Laurent’s mind had sparked with the possibility of visiting the national library, the holiest of all holy places, which his mother had tried to frown at. She warned him about heresy on their carriage ride but still held his hand on the seat, pointed out all the kites they could see through the windows flying overhead.

To his great dismay, they disembarked outside a quite boring building in the middle of town, and it proved to contain not books, but canvases and clay, precariously stacked stools and smelly paints. 

“We’ll visit the library after,” she whispered to him, and then had led him into the most crowded room of inanimate objects he’d ever seen.

Paintings patchworked up the walls to the ceiling, barely making room for the doorways, tucked tight to each other so that the wallpaper was nearly completely obscured. Their contents were women in huge dresses and dogs caught mid-leap through tall grass and stormy sea coasts. They are small wispy clouds and huge building facades, men with high collars and hordes of people, skulls in cloaks and bowls of fruit and bright flowers. Across the floor of the room stand statues and busts and sculptures of all kinds as well, curved bodies and rounded noses and angular somethings. Laurent finally blinked, after his eyes had begun to water.

A man and a woman entered from the other doorway, and jovially greeted Maman, like they’d known each other all their lives even though Laurent had never seen these people. He was tempted to revert to childish shyness, to hide behind and cling to his mother’s lovely soft skirts but instead he was pushed forward with a firm hand between his shoulder blades, and introduced as his own nine-year-old self. The woman joked that he was a potential buyer, but Laurent was still struck too silent to laugh along. He managed to escape to sit at the window and view the whole display in the gleaming light.

They did go to the national library, but only after Laurent had extracted every piece of information about what they’d just seen from Maman. What were all those paintings doing there? Were they really all by different people? From all over the continent? How can marble be shaped like that? But those flowers, that ocean, those people– they looked so real! They looked so blurred, so shaded, so obscured, so palpable. Maman had showed him the books on painting and sculpting and art history in the national library, and promised they would go back to the salon for the next season. Laurent had kept smiling for the whole carriage ride back, one hand tucked under his knees on the seat, and the other alternating between wild gesticulation and grasping excitedly at his mother’s sleeve.

\---

The sky is heavily clouded over on the morning he and Damen are to meet with the Patran merchant. Laurent makes a rare expression of perplexed amusement when Damen steps outside, glares at the sky and says “ill portents,” under his breath while he adjusts the straps of his braces around the thick muscle of his shoulders. They’d slept the night in the two separate bedrooms of the flat, or, at least, Damen had slept. Laurent had lain awake for most of the night, wracked with nerves over the entirety of his own plans. Seeing Damen pick out omens on their way to get breakfast from the market is surely not helping.

Freshly warm bread rolls in hand, Laurent guides Damen from the market to their client, through the narrow cobbled back streets which always seem to open suddenly out into a large bustling square, lined with imposing buildings and covered in geometric mosaics. Damen is distracted by absolutely everything, it seems, and Laurent rolls his eyes at this until he realizes that this man has likely never been outside of his own country until last year, when he was summoned to Vere. The dawdling is still inexcusable, and more than once Laurent has to reach back to tug on Damen’s arm to pull him away from gawping at tall spires and coloured glass.

They reach the – clearly new-money – townhouse, a slick structure of stone and wood just as Damen has apparently built up the courage to say something. Part of Laurent almost desperately wants to hear what it is that Damen’s finally decided to say, after a whole morning of mostly muttering and a night of tight silence, but the doorstep is not exactly where Laurent would like to have this conversation. He holds up a finger to cut Damen off in his tracks and knocks on the door. It’s opened by a maid.

They’re greeted brightly by the merchant Marco Aliyev himself in a lushly carpeted and draped receiving room. “Messieurs!” he exclaims in accented Veretian. “I have been expecting you!” Laurent idly thinks of how fine this room must be for music making with all its insulating tapestries and plush furniture, and bows his head in the Patran custom, hoping Damen is clever enough to follow along. A sidelong look reveals that one of Damen’s brows is in a quizzical position but his dimple is otherwise politely on display. Good, Laurent thinks. A good first impression.

“Monsieur Aliyev, it is our pleasure,” Laurent says, and then extends a hand to gesture at Damen. “May I introduce to you the distinguished portraitist, Damianos Theomedou.” Laurent avoids looking at Damen’s face and barrels onward. “Shall we sort out the particulars here or in the intended studio room?”

The merchant laughs, deep and hearty. “Straight to business, I like this way,” he says, his Veretian a little halting. Laurent allows himself a fortifying breath and the uptick of a corner of his mouth. 

Over the course of an hour or so the matters are settled one by one. Marco Aliyev is indeed of the notion that his relatively recent affluence is short-lived when paired with a wife who loves to shop as much as his does, and so a portrait must be done to capture the moment before it inevitably disappears. Damen manages to provide amiable chuckles at strategic intersections in the conversation, which Laurent would be impressed with if he hadn’t just witnessed him choke on his Patran tea at the mention of the offered payment amount. The size, prominence, materials, proportion of realism and intended resting place are all discussed as well, but Laurent does not let himself off his guard at the technical talk. 

Every so often he flicks his attention to Damen, who sits with brilliant posture on the edge of the sofa, his legs folded in a miraculously dainty manner and his heel ticking up and down during his more impassioned explanations of current lighting techniques. Laurent keeps these glances brief and attempts, not for the first time, to forget the brown of his eyes, the determined focus of his gaze when determined to inspect the very soul of something. His hands as well, which accomplish the magic of delineation, are clean and inviting and very likely as warm as they look. Laurent is slightly annoyed that he can barely recall those hands around him from that kiss they shared in the Arles studio, but that was–- a tactic. Just a looping of the artist around his finger, an insurance.

For an embarrassingly intense but brief moment as they leave the premises, notes on the forthcoming project tucked into Damen’s coat pocket like crumpled napkins, Laurent has the sudden urge to hold Damen’s hand. This is obviously an absurd notion, brought about by their renewed proximity to each other and the memories of his portrait sessions. He shakes it off and pulls at his collar.

“He was fond of Veretian turns of phrase, wasn’t he,” Damen says. Laurent turns just in time to see him push hair back from his forehead, eyes trained on Laurent.

“Quite so,” Laurent says, unsure of where this line of thought might be going. He tries to use a neighbour’s curtained window to adjust his ascot before their trek back to the flat – the heat is unreasonably humid here, no wonder Patran men forgo a neck tie – when Damen’s figure looms up like a shadow behind Laurent in the window reflection. “You’re blocking the light,” Laurent complains before he can think better of it, and catches the sound of Damen’s snort as he shifts back, but just for that moment, he felt that weight again, the solidity behind him. 

The walk back turns into a stroll through the city; not so much directionless as a relaxing of time, allowing themselves to wander. Damen continues to stop and assess particularly eye catching doorways, decorated with elaborate tiles set in geometric schemes, or wooden doors painted in singular, bright colours, mostly variations of blues and reds. 

“The Patrans have a rather different style of decoration, don’t they,” Damen remarks. He’s stopped in front of a screen door, slightly ajar and leading into someone’s garden. Laurent somehow expects Damen to throw open the door and march right onto someone’s property, but of course all he does when he approaches is touch his fingertips to the delicately carved wood, the interlaid lines, triangles and many-pointed stars. 

“It is only recently that Patran culture has allowed figurative images to be created and displayed,” Laurent says. He feels a creeping feeling along his neck, and pushes down a memory. “We should get to some supply stores.”

Damen moves away from the door with one last lingering look and they set off down the road again. The cloud cover seems to be shifting, revealing little blue patches for the sunlight to stream down, making way for a brighter day than first expected. A small breeze escorts them along the road, and into yet another square; the city seems to be overrun with them.

“What about a dog?” Damen says. He meanders over to one side of the square to look at the menu of a street cafe. 

Laurent looks away from his pocketwatch to furrow his brow at Damen. “What?”

“The figurative image thing. Would a dog count?” Damen starts pulling coins out of his pockets and counting them out in his hand. “Do you want this coffee drink? I’m going to try a coffee.”

Laurent looks around for some shade to stand in while he tries to remember what animal forms exist in Patran aniconic periods, which results in him watching Damen from the base of a plain, uncarved obelisk in the centre of the square. Damen looks – the same, or thereabouts, as before everything, when he was painting Laurent, as if all is where it should be. He doesn’t hold himself any differently, except perhaps the slope of his shoulders is slightly more pronounced, the cut of his jacket framing his thick torso. Laurent’s eyes drift over Damen’s figure from afar, as he navigates through the motions of buying his drink, and Laurent thinks of the possibility he had rendered for himself all that time ago: applying lavender powder to Damen’s visage and imagining a future where he would sit contentedly on Damen’s lap and apply powder and soft kisses, brushing them all away only to do it again. A foolish and petty idea, but one which nevertheless hovers nearby, fluttering. 

In an attempt at nonchalance, Laurent takes his pocket watch out again when he sees Damen search the square for him. The stone of the obelisk at his back has not yet been warmed by the sun, and Laurent lingers there for as long as he can, putting his watch back in his pocket and letting his eyes blur over his fingers long enough for an orange to be thrust under his nose.

“The drink is deliciously spiced, but one doesn’t need more than a single cup, I should think,” says Damen, gesturing back to the cafe. “I got this for you.”

Laurent takes the orange, fingers automatically running over the texture of the peel. “Supplies, then? And food, as well.”

Damen starts to shoot him a flash of a smile but turns away to face the sun, and they walk off in search of the market. Laurent finds himself searching for that smile again, in anticipation of something that he cannot quite put his finger on.

\---

At seventeen, brimming with the feeling of his own strength and poise, Laurent escorted his mother to an evening salon in Arles. It was not the first he had been to, nor the last, but there was something special about this night that Laurent could somehow sense permeating the crisp city air before they went indoors. His suit for the night was dark and sharply cut, his collar high and starched and tucked neatly beneath his jaw, his hair gleaming in the lamplight of the reception room; a design of himself so exquisitely curated that surely no one could resist a glance, even among all the other masterpieces. 

The town house felt expansive and lush too; as his mother guided him through the entryway on arrival, Laurent had caught glimpses of velvet chairs and heavy curtains, a dark wallpaper embellished with floral scrolls and curves. Silk gowns crowded the salon rooms, interspersed with suit tails and frock coats; smoke lingered in the air above, puffed out of cigarettes daintily held in jade and silver holders. A pair of twins in matching wine-red dresses with short puffed sleeves sat leaning on top of a sideboard, darting their eyes around the crowd over coupe glasses filled with a warm amber liquid. A man with a long braided beard seemed to hold court next to a painting of a wide winter landscape, his Kemptian embroidered coat barely able to contain his full body gesticulations. More and more of these individuals appeared in Laurent’s line of sight and he was filled with the buoyancy that tends to infuse these events, something light and airy, infused with drinks and high spirits and artistic drama. 

Maman’s hand slipped out from around his arm as she called out to some people she recognized, and Laurent turned away to gauge where he should start his turn about the salon. A colourful pointillist piece on the far wall caught his eye and he made his way over, but soon he drifted slowly along the wall, engaged with each piece for long enough to see that it wasn’t what he was truly interested in.

Further along, as Laurent stood staring up at one of the largest portraits in the room, he felt a presence stop behind him; not touching, in fact Laurent felt quite aware of the exact distance between his own body and this person. 

A low voice spoke, nearly a whisper, “An old subject drawn anew?” The man had a slight accent, but Laurent couldn’t place it. He turned to see a pale face, perhaps closer than expected, a dark moustache quirked above a sly smile. “And here I thought death and the maiden was as banal as tropes could get.”

A fraction of a second too late, Laurent blinked his eyes away from his sudden companion’s lips, up to hazel eyes and a tangle of brown curls, parted to the side. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” Laurent managed.

“Very like me to start critiquing art before I’ve even introduced myself,” the man said, as he backed up only to provide sufficient space between them for a little bow. “Monsieur Marius Deschamps. And you are?”

Laurent gave his name, a little struck. He had never met anyone so particularly intent on meeting him, or knowing him at all beyond his family, especially in the context of what he referred to as his mother’s world, that of art and of modern – almost common – city culture. The man kept his eyes on Laurent the whole time, a frankly unanticipated amount of attention. 

Marius finally glanced away, up to the painting Laurent had been studying; Laurent dealt with some sort of catch in his throat as he was faced with the man’s smooth jaw.

“It’s not yours, is it?” Marius said in a hush, looking slyly out the side of his eye at Laurent.

“No, I – it’s not. I don’t paint,” Laurent stammered. He swung his gaze firmly back to the canvas, back to the earth tones and broad brushstrokes, the shapes which barely resembled human figures, standing apart from one another, faceless. “I just found some part of it very . . . captivating, I suppose,” he said.

Marius hummed in agreement. “In the absence of the maidens’ usual astonished lineaments in their encounter of death, we’re left to view the entire work as a whole to derive the atmosphere, the overall tone of their reaction.”

Laurent admittedly hadn’t quite thought this thoroughly about the painting, only really admiring the colours and grand scale. He didn’t dare to say as much to Marius, though, instead nodding along. Marius’ fingers tangled at Laurent’s elbow.

“In fact, there are styles of art – outside of Vere, naturally – which do not depict any sort of creature, either man or beast,” he said, leaning close to Laurent. “Could you imagine a state in which an artist is deterred by such religious sanctions as to express all the usual emotions which the arts possess, through purely abstracted means?”

Marius’ nose was nearly brushing the hair by Laurent’s ear by now, and he found that he did not mind it. Their voices were hushed and low, down in a bubble amidst the hubbub of the steadily crowding salon, and Laurent did not think he was imagining the little sparks like jewels in Marius’ eyes. He took a moment to tuck his hair behind his other ear, dip his chin for a brief moment, and look back up under his lashes. He thought, what an interesting man, to get to know better.

“And how would you express, as you say, ‘the usual emotions’, if you found yourself under such a regime,” Laurent asked, and Marius smiled, a flash of white teeth, a huff of air between them.

“Perhaps,” Marius purred, “in all the usual ways.” His fingers drifted up the back of Laurent’s arm. “I am not an artist, after all,” to which Laurent had to reward him with a glimpse of his own quick smile, then. 

They traversed the rest of the room in that way, lingering under each piece that held their interest, Laurent endeavouring to make comments consisting of more than just his vague opinions. Marius was always there with a special insight, tucked over Laurent’s shoulder, and no one else really – seemed to mind. Maman had not reappeared since she’d left him to his own devices, and the rest of the salon-goers were too focussed on either the art or each other to give any notice to two young men, slipping out into the hall, ducking into a dark room. 

“–your favourite work of the night?” Marius finished, leaning back against the wall, the light through the doorway illuminating only part of his face. Laurent looked off into the dark of the room, pondering his answer. There had been many to catch his interest over the course of the night, throughout the rooms; of course the faceless death and the maidens that had originally caught his eye, and there was that small depiction of a dappled Veretian riverside in the summertime, or a harbour rendered in bright stippled colours, or a hazily rendered vase of orange nasturtiums, foliage flowing over the sides of the container. Laurent adjusted the crease of his lapel, considering.

“Perhaps the sculpture of those three men,” said Laurent, recalling the smooth lumps and curves of bronze standing atop what seemed like jagged rock, their shoulders bent and troubled. He slid a foot forward on the parquet next to Marius’. “And yours?”

Marius raked his gaze over him, and Laurent said, upper lip curling into another smile at his own desire, of being desired, “Wait. Let me guess.”

\---

If Laurent stops to think about it, it’s a very peculiar situation he’s found himself in. Waking up to the dry, cool air through the slatted window screen, well before the day has had time to build in heat, he feels almost settled, held close in his sheets, able to hear the noise of the morning market from across the tops of the buildings, a couple blocks away. When he ventures downstairs to the little kitchen to sit by the window with a piece of fruit, he shouldn’t let himself think about the little pieces of their combined lives slowly filling up the space; the two coats hung by the door, the cup of water Damen left out last night, the – soft footsteps as Damen wakes up and prepares to come down. More often than not they end up sitting in the calm of the morning together like they’re friends, perhaps like they’re more than friends, and Laurent has to close his eyes against it.

The city is a good distraction, at least initially. 

If Laurent’s experience with Arles did not quite prepare him for the particular bustle of Bazal, then he wonders how Damen must be faring with the sprawling city centre, its crowds and sounds and smells, the towering monuments and buildings, the sheer focus required to navigate along even a short path through the disorder and commotion. Damen has never explicitly said he was from a smaller town, even stating the capital Ios as his home, but Laurent can tell, beyond the polished facade, that Damen comes from humbler upbringing. His amazement at the imposing and extravagant architecture of banks, hotels, and government buildings is nothing that could be borne from someone who had grown up in a modern and active city like Ios.

That said, Laurent can’t help but be at least somewhat awed by the structures themselves, how they incorporate all the same geometric details and ornaments as the simple doors and screens they witnessed on that first visit to Aliyev’s house. More compelling were the living things; fish and eels and other sea creatures kept alive in ocean-filled barrels, pheasants and doves trotting around the stalls like customers themselves, huge flocks of storks smattering the skyline behind the city’s tallest spire on one golden evening. 

Damen brings a little sketchbook and pencils around with him everywhere, often opting to let Laurent choose their groceries in favour of finding a bench to sit on or an archway to lean in and make drawings from. Laurent gives him some distance the first time it happens, but eventually he comes up to Damen with his arms full of bread and vegetables and a bag of fish and sees the open page sitting on Damen’s knee as he basks in the sun. 

The picture is all rough but purposeful lines depicting the shape of the market stalls, shaded appropriately with the mid-morning light, the couple of donkeys Laurent could hear braying captured in a quiet, almost reflective moment, their eyes dark and heads softly bent. Damen stands up then, before Laurent can make out more, and offers his hands out to take some of the shopping for their walk back to the house, and in the shifting of food Laurent slips the sketchbook from Damen’s hand. 

“May I?” Laurent asks, even as he’s flipping to the previous page, feeling only a little twinge of guilt when Damen says, clearly hesitant, “Well–”

There’s a page of the square they meandered around yesterday, everything set at a distance, with the chatty group of old ladies off to the side, under the shade of a wide, tasselled umbrella, their scarves merely a couple gestural lines; a page of studies of fruit, set plainly in a bowl by a window, the light coming delicately from the side; a page of some little repeating patterns and geometric designs; a page of just horses, to Laurent’s delight, likely from the day their visit to the market overlapped with a livestock auction, their tails swishing and hooves prancing even in the stillness of pencil; a page of cows, a page with a jewelry stall, everywhere the most mundane fashioned into something captivating and beautiful in its realism. Laurent recollects that Damen has been taught to portray exactly what he sees in all its truths, and yet his depictions manage to show their subjects in such a fluid and enticing light. 

He flips to the next page in time to see a face in profile, wisps of hair around an ear – Damen shuts the sketchbook with a firm palm, taking it to stow in his bag with a breathy ‘ _okay, going home, now_ ’. Laurent bites down on a smile threatening to bubble up from that tingling place in his chest, for that last page was certainly a familiar subject indeed. When he sits down at his little folding desk in the evening, he fully realises how surprising it is that Damen would want to keep drawing him. He has the adventurousness and curiosity to choose any number of study subjects, and there’s no lack of inspiration in this city, and yet. Laurent picks up his book to read in the fading summer light, and he may or may not pretend it is the sunset on his face that makes him feel the heat there.

For the first couple of sitting sessions with Aliyev, Laurent attends out of some sense of duty as intermediator of the whole interaction, but once it becomes clear that he is left with little else to do than to sit to the side and stare at Damen’s figure as he works for a couple hours, Laurent decides that this time could be used more effectively. 

As much as he wishes to completely detach himself from Veretian society, Laurent is mature enough to recognize his own feelings of longing for his family. He has precariously re-routed correspondences to arrive at a particular bank in town, and it’s a couple weeks before he pays a visit. He has a letter each from Auguste, Maman, and his father’s lawyer, dated in that order, although the lawyer’s letter is significantly more recent than the others. Laurent finds an empty bench in a nearby square, unable to bring himself to return to the empty house. Steeling himself, he opens the first letter.

The majority of Auguste’s note merely expresses his desire for Laurent to return, so that he may be relieved of the attention their parents have now solely fixed on him. Considering his more salacious tendencies, Laurent is inclined to let Auguste stew in his own mire for the time being. At least he ends his note with the wish that all is well for Laurent, wherever he may be. It warms a little part of his heart, he thinks, tucking the paper back into the envelope. 

He feels bolstered enough to check the letter from the lawyer, determined not to let the contents intimidate him. What is a lawyer but just another brute enforcer, he thinks, reading the first couple lines of official jargon and deciphering them into their really quite thinly veiled threats, through to what they truly conceal. It appears his father is worried that Laurent’s newly acquired social freedom will lead him to such lengths as extortion, and Laurent has to lean back on the bench, look away from the letter and laugh. A charmless mirth bubbles up in him, and he tears the letter in half without reading the rest. If his father or his father’s lawyer thinks that Laurent will stoop to blackmailing his own family with non-existent dalliances for more of what will still become his own fortune in due time, then, well. Laurent shoos a meandering pigeon away with a foot and picks up his mother’s letter, ready for a cleanse of the palate.

Maman has always written beautifully. There could surely be no difference between her personal communications and her novels and treatises, which she keeps somewhat hidden in the library at the estate. Laurent’s sure that they’ve never been published, even under a pen name, and has never mentioned their existence to anyone, instead silently admiring her deft handling of prose, her calm elucidating manner. The letter in his hands now, so similar to every other piece of her writing, took his heart into the embrace of ink on page as easily as if Maman were here to cradle him herself. 

She begins with a description of the latest news in their private salon world, as Laurent is merely away on holiday. The latest featured another selection of bronze sculptures, by the same artist as the one he had liked so long ago, and Maman describes them beautifully, in all their rough aching and raw feeling. A small fraction of Laurent’s heart creaks with the feeling of everything occurring as normal, as if he could just return to Arles and resume a life he had tried to give up, but which would not truly let go of him. He shakes his head, resting the letter in his lap for a moment.

Who is Damen, really, to be the catalyst for this entirely new section of Laurent’s entire life? What has taken root inside of Laurent’s mind to offer up the pondering of Damen’s thoughts on modern Veretian sculpture? He has been utterly and decisively willing to spend all this money and effort on lodging, on supplies, on forging connections, in order to relieve some of the lingering and stinging guilt, that he was the one to ruin two lives with his actions. What kind of selfish man would his mother see in him now? 

For now, Maman only knows him as someone who deserves to hear about her love. She writes not of her desire for his return, but her desire for his own happiness, which – well, Laurent can’t comprehend what that could possibly be. At this moment, he’s more than busy with helping Damen’s professional recovery; he’s even been able to contact prospective clients in Patras for after this one. If Laurent wishes to accompany Damen along his future career for a couple more portraits, then that’s just his business, and his alone.

Maman finishes her letter with an excerpt of poetry from one of Laurent’s favourite books as a child, a passage which fills his heart with a bubbling mixture of nostalgia and disquiet. He rids his thoughts of his past life and society and most of all _Damen_ while he tucks the letters away in his coat and finds something sweet for lunch. Later, when Damen comes back to the house, Laurent can avert his eyes from the slope of his shoulders, fix his stare on the kettle and the little mirror by the coathooks near the door, let Damen’s own gaze wash right off his back like nothing has changed. Or perhaps as if everything still has.

When Damen had been painting his portrait, Laurent had never considered the amount of time Damen had been working on it while Laurent was not in the room. Now, as he bears firsthand witness to the life of an artist during a project, he’s confronted with the enormity of the task outside of client sittings. 

One afternoon, he finds Damen sitting at the window with a vase of flowers, studying them intensely and mixing colours on a little palette. A couple of days later, he’s got a single tall boot positioned on the floor in front of him, and Damen snaps at Laurent before he can catch himself, for blocking the light for an instant. Laurent dares to ask over lunch on that weekend how the portrait is progressing, and only receives a long, drawn-out sigh in answer, until:

“Actually, Laurent,” Damen says, with a brightening of his voice Laurent hasn’t heard in – possibly ever. “Would you be willing to help with something?”

He finds himself arranged on a chair up in Damen’s room, angled so that the light from the window falls across his feet, a length of heavy, intricately patterned fabric draped off of one shoulder and across his knees to pool down on the floor. Laurent tries to keep still in the position Damen had gently handled him into, and watches Damen set up his palette, the canvas hiding most of his face from Laurent’s view. He wishes he’d taken his jacket off before accepting to act the model; he can already start to feel the sweat accumulating under his arms.

Without a word, Damen starts to paint. It’s familiar, of course, the way he makes a couple strokes with his brush and then steps back, eyes flicking from the canvas to Laurent and back again. Laurent notices the same acute focus in Damen’s eyes as before, as if he is able to look through Laurent’s own personhood and into solely the vision of him. It was more than Laurent could take even back then, but at least he knows that Damen’s only painting the fabric this time.

Damen steps back and brings a hand up to his chin to review his own work, and something jolts from the gradually sleepy calm in Laurent’s mind when Damen’s eyes glance up from Laurent’s knees to his eyes. He can feel a blush start to form, and he prepares the excuse of the warm temperature underneath the cloth, but Damen looks back to the canvas, shifting forward again so it hides his face. 

It feels so much the same as before, the both of them falling into the same sort of motions, shadowing their former selves in double time. What took weeks only feels like it takes minutes as Laurent starts to think about his mother’s letter, the tamped down yearning for the supposed normalcy of home, how precarious and thrilling his time leading up to the calculated social disaster of the Académie salon was. The same dance steps seem to pan out in this room as they did across the studio floor in Arles, and soon Laurent is clenching his hands so tightly together under the swathe of fabric that he thinks he may bruise himself, but he can’t stop staring at Damen and delighting in the sight of little jumps in his jaw muscle, the deepening gaze of his eyes. In the almost stifling silence of the room it feels like they’ve been sinking further and further down into whichever abyss Laurent has been leading them into, and, with a swipe through the dark red umber on his palette, Damen puts down his brush.

Laurent’s breath seems to catch in his throat, certain that any movement now will snap the wire currently pulling Damen out from behind his easel, into Laurent’s space, letting out the shaky breath that Laurent wishes he could release from his own lungs. It’s barely a moment in which to observe that Damen is hunching down over Laurent’s face because he’s kissing him, deep and unhurried, a long drag of lips across Laurent’s own. They’re surely curled like the lovers in paintings but Laurent feels flushed with too much colour; this thing in his chest, released with Damen’s fingers twining back into his hair, is too vibrant to be captured in any medium, and Laurent finds his own hands untangling from themselves and from the cloth, twisting into the curls at the back of Damen’s neck. 

Damen groans then, more a rumble through the kiss and a tightening of his fingers than real sound, and Laurent can’t imagine why this didn’t happen before, why he couldn’t have just– when the scandal itself was– and Laurent forgets it all, scooting forward in his seat, knees opening automatically. Damen bites Laurent’s lip and drags a hand down Laurent’s neck to his chest, his ribs. Laurent’s tugging on Damen’s hair and neck and collar finally brings him down to half-kneeling, and the sounds Damen makes when Laurent slides his tongue into the kiss, slowing it all down to a heady, heavenly pace. Little noises seem to catch in the back of Damen’s throat as if there are words he could be saying but Laurent can’t be bothered to let them be voiced, not when Damen angles Laurent’s head back and away to get at his neck, sucking a section of his throat just below his jaw that Laurent can feel himself hardening from.

Before his gasping can get too desperate, before he stays in this damned chair with his legs tangled up in someone else’s fabric – Laurent topples them both to the floor, fingers tearing at his own neck scarf, Damen’s hands finding greater purchase on Laurent’s hips. 

“Watch that cloth,” Damen pants, even as he lifts his knees, Laurent’s weight settling in between his thighs. “It’s not mine.” 

Laurent would roll his eyes if he had the inclination to do anything other than bare his neck to Damen’s mouth again, to get his own hands underneath Damen’s aggravatingly tight waistcoat. The cloth goes mostly somewhere else, Laurent thinks. He can’t really care about it much at this moment.

Damen lets out a particularly gravelly sigh as Laurent finds the wherewithal to press his hips down onto Damen’s, an action repeated almost immediately once Damen’s hands give up trying to get Laurent’s shirt off while it’s still under his jacket, and he places them firmly on Laurent’s ass, squeezing down. Laurent gasps and then whines quietly with the solid touch, letting his lips find a button, a cool stretch of linen, the promise of warm skin laying just underneath. 

“Oh, _Laurent_ ,” Damen manages to groan out, and they’ve barely done anything yet, it’s not enough for Laurent now that he’s seen and felt all that he’d been trying to ignore. Laurent clenches his jaw down on a moan at the rocking together of their hips, shoving a hand up under Damen’s waistcoat so forcefully that he hears a seam rip, and suddenly he’s being flipped to the side, an arm cradling his head. 

He meets Damen’s eyes then, looking up with his mouth agape and Damen’s lips reddened and shiny, his look a dark and smoldering thing. Laurent is entranced in the expression, he’s never seen anything like it. Damen’s fingers smooth over Laurent’s stomach, deftly unbutton the fly of his trousers, and presses a palm over his growing erection, and Laurent fights the urge to close his eyes at the feeling, a near-drugging sense of arousal washing over him, as tense as he is. Damen hushes him with delicate kisses, rubbing his hand up and down Laurent, the fingers of his other hand tangling themselves in Laurent’s hair once again. 

Laurent feels himself whisper Damen’s name, clutching at Damen’s bicep, but with each slow minute passing he can’t quite succumb to the pleasure he’s being given. He realises he’s too tense, still, can’t help but start thinking about what his hands are doing, who he’s letting touch him so lovingly, how rough his breathing has become. “Please,” he says aloud, unsure what it is he’s pleading for, but wishing that his own mind could simply let him be. He feels the edge of pleasure slipping away despite Damen’s sucking kisses at his collarbone, his hand stroking slow and firm along his cock. 

Damen hums at Laurent’s plea, and levers his arm out from under Laurent’s head, leaving a wet smack of a kiss on what’s sure to be a mark next morning. He twists down Laurent’s torso, shifting to sit in between Laurent’s spread legs rather than the half straddle he’d been in before. Laurent looks up to see the bulge at Damen’s crotch, the material too dark to tell if it’s become wet just from what Damen’s been doing to Laurent, but he can imagine touching it now as Damen moves away, the firm but tender weight underneath his hand. He feels himself twitch again at that, but has no time to realize what Damen has moved down for until Damen’s mouth laves over the head of Laurent’s cock.

“ _Ah_ , you– you’re–” he stammers without thought, and he thinks he sees a glint in Damen’s eye when he looks up, just as he swallows down around the shaft, moving up to trace his tongue around Laurent’s foreskin. His hands dart to Damen’s hair but maybe this is worse – _better_ – because now he can feel the motion each time Damen sinks down, drags back up, flicks his tongue. One of Damen’s hands comes up to scratch through the hair at the base of Laurent’s cock and along his belly, and Laurent can only tighten his grip in Damen’s curls; a whimper makes it past his clenched teeth. He has no time to warn Damen with more than a gasp and a sudden jerk of his leg and then he falls over the edge, coming hard into Damen’s hardworking mouth. Damen groans then, his hand tightening where it landed around Laurent’s thigh, sliding off of Laurent’s cock with a gasp of his own. Laurent dazedly watches Damen’s brows furrow in ecstasy, mouth dropping open as he clings to Laurent with one hand and grinds his still-clothed cock into the other as he comes.

Laurent suddenly wants to say he could’ve helped Damen with that, but the air between them is filled with the quiet panting of getting one’s breath back, and with the loll of his head against the floorboards he sees the swathe of fabric he had just been modelling rumpled around one of the easel legs. It’s easier to say nothing and to tuck himself back into his trousers, let Damen sit back on his heels. It’s also easier to just focus on finally and properly sitting up and ridding himself of his jacket, adjusting the straps of his braces but leaving the neck of his shirt open; he’d severely loosened a button sometime during all this, it’s hanging by a thin thread, and his neck scarf is somewhere around–

“Thanks for your help,” Damen says gently, and when Laurent snaps his head up he sees a slight smirk, too. He refuses to blush, on principle, so he just gathers his things and stands, now taller than Damen, who’s still kneeling on the floor, a darker patch now clearly visible on his trousers, which– 

“Yes, well,” Laurent says, like an idiot. He flees out of the room before he can incriminate himself further, and wonders uneasily about his decisions.

\---

Laurent found he couldn’t keep his mind from straying to his latest meetings with Marius, no matter how much his family tried to keep his attention at home. He imagined the shock that might ensue if he revealed over dinner the fact that he’d let Marius toss him off so slowly and sweetly in the empty upper room of a tea parlour two weeks ago, or if his father might just continue sipping his apéritif, Maman might just say ‘ _very nice, dear,_ ’ and finish reading her book. Laurent felt too contained here, as if his time at home was spent stuffed in a cupboard, let out only for horse rides and mealtimes. 

Marius, though. He made Laurent want to run fast enough to make his legs tired and his lungs burn for air. Laurent had never thought before of a person so delightfully full of life, who could so inspire the life within himself as well. It was a whirlwind, if that could appropriately describe the nearly fortnightly meetings in private rooms, drinks at expensive bars and kisses pulled into hidden alleyways. Laurent had always laughed at Auguste’s escapades in the city, but now that he had one of his own he could very much see the appeal. 

The only thing was that, despite having kept up the secret for nearly a year – and thrilled with much of it – Laurent could never quite see where it might all end up. Marius had joked about houses he might own in the future, how many views out of how many windows he could possibly have with a countryside parcel of land. How many horses Laurent could name for him. But such was the stuff of conversations held lying on pillows, and not much more. 

Maman found him in a yearning mood one afternoon in the library, while he sat on the window sill and took in the damp lawn below, the avenue of plane trees. She perched a dusty brown book on his knees, some papers tucked between the pages nearly spilling out. Laurent recognized it with a little jolt.

“Where did you find this?” he asked, opening the hard cover and straightening the loose papers. He brushed his fingers over the first of the poems

“Underneath one of the chairs in the small sitting room,” she said. “I remember how you carried it around with you for, what, half a year?”

“And then started translating them, yes,” said Laurent. He’d been so enamoured with the Kemptian poetry, especially after his first trip to visit relatives there, and had decided it was his own personal task to introduce the works to the Veretian public. Clearly he’d become distracted with some other venture, and left the poems to gather dust over the years, but– Laurent flipped to a page near the end, trying to find it. Maman read over his shoulder.

“ _Som gull, glitrende og skimrende_ ,” she recited, then switched to Laurent’s half-finished translation in pencil in the margin, “ _Comme l’or, scintillant et chatoyant_. This one was your favourite, yes?”

“Yes,” Laurent murmured, his mind already working to finish the translation. _Solnedgangen_ became _the sunset_ , and _vaskes over veggene_ became _is washed over the walls_. They moved to the desk for a pencil, Maman asked him about the use of present continuous phrases, and Laurent’s chest swelled with a unique satisfaction. 

“ _Jeg står og hører på bøkene, car ils ont des mots tranquilles à dire,_ which cannot be heard until the light shines over them.” 

“It’s lovely,” Maman said, and Laurent could certainly agree. 

At the end of the week, Laurent went into Arles with Auguste, and through a mutual and unspoken agreement, parted ways with him for the evening. They never asked each other where they’ve been, and Laurent knew that neither of them would be very much inclined to know about the other’s business regardless. Laurent met Marius at the top of a narrow set of stairs in a well known dance hall, letting Marius hold him by the waist as he unlocked an unassuming door.

“What do you know about poetry?” Laurent asked a little later, breathing finally slowed. He had a hand tucked behind his head, Marius’s fingers idly scratching through the hair in his exposed armpit. He tried not to squirm at the sensation. 

“Not much,” Marius trilled. “I like the visual arts best, of course.”

Laurent hummed. “It’s just that– well, I found a book of translations that I’d done of some Kemptian poetry, and–” he cut himself off at the expression on Marius’ face, one which may have fooled a petty aristocrat with no sense of self-consciousness, but which Laurent unquestionably recognized. He’d seen it too many times on his father’s face to identify anything but thinly concealed boredom. 

Marius noticed Laurent’s pause and stroked his palm over Laurent’s breast. “Go on,” he said.

Laurent clenched his jaw. “There’s a poem in there that’s about the light from a sunset shining like gold over books in a library, and it’s – I like it. I like translating it,” he said, finishing with a huff. He’d have to leave to meet Auguste soon for their late journey back to the house.

“Oh, speaking of gold,” Marius laughed. “I had something to ask. You can say no, of course, but . . .” He sat upright then, his loose shirt hanging open around his torso. “Could you lend me some money? Just a little, modest sum.” Marius wrapped his hand firmly around Laurent’s hip. “I’ve got something special planned.” He winked.

Laurent bit his lip, and continued to bite it for the long carriage ride home, and all the way upstairs, holding a candle in front of him down the long hall to his rooms. 

If a little of his allowances and a little of his father’s banknotes changed hands, no one particularly seemed to notice. Laurent steadily worked on some translations while at home, and Marius smiled a little more widely the next time they saw each other. 

He attended another private salon with Maman, wearing a new cravat in the palest blue, a little gift from his last meeting with Marius, which just happened to match his mother’s dress tonight. She kept her arm in his for the first half of the night, silently patting his hand and giving him a look with slightly raised eyebrows, as if to say, ‘don’t make a fuss, I’ll let you go when it’s time’. Laurent knew when to obey for his own good. 

They mingled with the usual hosts in the sculpture room, and while Maman chatted about something Laurent couldn’t pay attention to. He stared at a bust instead, set off in the corner and under slight shadow, but Laurent could make out that it was not carved from the typical lighter material. Instead, it was made of a dark green stone, shiny and smooth in the parts that caught the light. The darkness of it emphasised the curves of each cheek, the broad nose, the strong chin, and Laurent would have tried to extricate himself from his mother’s grasp to go examine it, if not for the conversation he heard then.

“What would Marius need with sapphires? They hardly suit his complexion.”

“My thought exactly! But, well,” there was a pause, for what Laurent assumed was a suggestive facial expression, “he doesn’t need to be buying jewelry for himself, does he.”

A small gasp arose from the first speaker. “I wonder who it could be . . .”

“It might explain the theatre tickets I heard he bought the other night,” a third speaker spoke up, to the gossipy delight of the other two. Laurent suppressed a hiccup of reaction and shifted his weight against his mother, thrilling a little at the prospect of a proper outing, out in public with a real lover, truly able to make a spectacle. He didn’t wear much jewelry, but perhaps he could start wearing a little more.

“– when she saw him enter the Maison de Charls and, _aha_ , come out with several dress boxes. Big ones.” 

“Lucky girl, whoever she is.” Laurent’s heart stuttered for a second.

“Wonder which witless fellow Marius scammed the funds off of this time,” someone said, and Laurent – his arm tightened around his mother’s and she jumped a little at the sudden grip, and he apologized but he had to leave for just a minute, he’d be back shortly, don’t run off, and – 

The hallway was blissfully empty. Laurent leaned his shoulders back against the wood panel of the wall, breath coming short through his nose, his lips sealed tight together. He didn’t realise he was shivering until his arms came up automatically to hug himself. He should have known.

He should have suspected, why would someone like Marius – he laughed about it after, the thought of people _like Marius_ – why would they ever want Laurent for anything other than his money? His family’s status? He’d thought a patron of the art circles, a patron of dance hall back rooms, could be sufficiently set apart from those greedy desires, but no, he’d only played right into the avaricious hands – 

Maman had moved over to the dark green sculpture when Laurent returned, and while he joined her with a smile and a reassurance, he had already started a plan of action. A rather direct one, with only two steps.

The first came at his next meeting with Marius. They met in the same tea parlour upper room, but before Marius could extend his hand, curl it around Laurent’s neck to run his thumb over the back of Laurent’s hairline, Laurent caught his wrist.

“What,” Laurent said darkly, “did you use my money for, Marius.”

He spluttered, as expected. “Can’t it be a surprise, Lau–”

“ _Who_ are you using my money for?” Laurent’s grip tightened as Marius tried to pull his arm away.

“You’re acting very strangely tonight,” said Marius, voice gathering a bit of strain to it.

“ _Tell me_ ,” said Laurent, feeling Marius’ desperate pulse under his fingers. He watched the other man swallow unsteadily.

Marius’ sister, apparently, had aspirations of joining the higher society of Arles. Laurent could laugh at the idea. As he rode the carriage home with Auguste, he almost did, stifling a crazed, mirthless little thing at how simply everyone’s minds worked. The sister would no doubt be fashionable enough to turn heads at a couple of balls, but really, once one ran out of new dresses, once one wore the same jewelry over and over, one would never really be more elevated in rotten city society than one was before, only in slightly more debt because of it. 

It didn’t mean that his heart wasn’t crumbling a little, though. A waste, was what Laurent kept coming back to, that’s all it was. Not only of money, but of his time, his energy, his own damnable emotions.

The opportunity for the second step arose a little over a year later, at a larger art event. Laurent had avoided all salons afterwards, telling Maman that he only wished to pursue other interests for a time, but this gathering was larger, slightly more official, and would not raise questions about his presence, especially in the accompaniment of his mother. 

Some time in the night, Laurent found himself in a quieter section of the gallery, meandering along a row of landscapes, listening with half an ear to other people’s conversations. He’d not really had the motivation to leave the house for quite a time, and had close to zero expectations for tonight, until a painting caught his eye. Or rather, its artist did.

They were Akielon, a rare sight even in the smaller, more obscure private salons, and a closer inspection of the gallery guide revealed that nearly all the works in this small section were Akielon. No wonder it was quiet. Veretians, especially those from Arles, never held Akielons in very high esteem. Laurent thought, in the quiet carnage of his own affections, that he may have found his way out after all.

\---

Early in the morning, nearing the end of one month since he’d arrived here, Damen calls Laurent up to his room, which has transformed further into a storm of a studio. Laurent picks his way across the floor over cups and plates and pieces of cloth, only looking up when he reaches Damen, standing in front of his easel. 

The finished painting is . . . of Marco Aliyev. It’s not the most exceptional piece of work Laurent has ever seen but he supposes that such an opinion is mostly due to his lack of interest in the subject, more than Damen’s portraiture skill. He saw _Monsieur X_ , the ghostly, intense, solemnly elegant version of himself, only with a couple of shirt buttons open, neck tie undone. He’s seen those notebook sketches, and even a small sample work, and they were all so much more enthralling than this. Damen’s work tends to have a certain unnameable quality, regardless of the model.

Damen raises his eyebrows at him; an expectant look. Laurent shrugs.

“It’s finished,” he says tactfully. At the crossing of Damen’s arms Laurent huffs and says, voice rising a little, “Yes, I’m sure you’ve got all the colours right. Can you blame me for not suddenly seeing the– the, transcendent beauty of Mr. Aliyev?” 

Damen considers this, and says, “Understandable. Breakfast, then?”

They make their way to the market, but notice a certain agitation in the air as they arrive. Laurent wonders which of the stallkeepers he should ask first about what might be happening, but Damen picks up a newspaper, and Laurent stumbles through a mental translation of the Patran headline.

“A reinstatement of– oh _no_.”

Damen pulls him along the street by his elbow but Laurent can’t stop reading the by-lines over again and again, ‘ _Patran monarch, urged by religious advisors, rules for reinstatement of aniconism_.’ He doesn’t notice they’ve returned to the house until Damen lets go of his elbow and Laurent bumps into a chair.

“Damen, what are you doing? We should be going to Aliyev’s,” Laurent calls after him.

Damen clatters down the stairs, the unframed portrait, hastily wrapped in brown paper held in front of him like a shield. “We are going to Aliyev’s,” he says, breath coming quick. Laurent doesn’t question it.

The look on the maid’s face as she opens the door to the sight of them does not bode well, but Laurent stays silent as they’re led to the same sitting room as the first time. Aliyev is already there, hair mussed, a stern, upright look on his face. He cuts Damen off when he starts to speak, holding up a hand, rings glinting in the light from the window.

“You must know, I cannot accept the painting,” Aliyev says, as if it’s that simple. It’s like there’s an itch under Laurent’s skin, and he takes a step forward.

“At least look at it,” he says. “See all the fine work that’s been put into it.”

Aliyev shakes his hand back and forth, still holding it in the air. Laurent wants to smack it out of the way. “I cannot, my position in this society prevents me from doing so,” he says. 

Laurent wants to scream. “It’s your own image, and you can’t–!” he starts, but Damen’s hand latches onto his elbow again.

“Laurent,” Damen says, and when Laurent turns he sees such an expression of defeat on Damen’s face that something cracks in his heart. “Let’s just go.”

“He should at least pay you, Damen,” Laurent says, but can sense that that’s not going to happen; Aliyev is shaking his hand again, shaking his head too, refusing every offer.

Laurent walks back across town in a fog, a couple steps behind Damen, only able to focus on the centre-back of Damen’s coat, how the fabric stretches across his shoulders. Anything else is too painful to think about; how he ruined him again. There’s a choking tightness high up in his throat, but it won’t break into real tears, even when his eyes catch on the painting now tucked under Damen’s arm. 

As Damen takes the painting up to his room – his fingers clenched too tightly around the edge of the canvas, knocking the corner of it into the wall before he slams the door – Laurent lingers in the entryway, knowing that he can’t face Damen like this again. If it makes him a coward then so be it, but Laurent knows he will not survive Damen hating him for ruining another portrait, wasting another month’s worth of labour and care and skill, not after last time, and especially not after everything that has happened since then. 

Laurent ascends the stairs to his room as quietly as he can, and starts packing a bag. Only the belongings he can carry with him easily, as there are so many things that are replaceable. Before he packs his writing tools he scratches out an apology, despite the fact that Damen’s anger will likely burn through the paper with all its insufficiency at appeasing any hurt or loss. Laurent has – he’s _proven_ that he’s damaging to Damen’s life whether he likes it or not, and so it’s for the best that he cuts himself off before the wound can spread.

His hands are shaking as he exits his room. There’s a series of sharp sounds from behind Damen’s door which Laurent only identifies as ripping canvas until he’s reached the foot of the stairs. He closes the front door behind him as softly as possible, clenches the hand not holding his suitcase, and leaves. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works referenced in this chapter:  
> [Pierre-Cecile Puvis de Chavannes (death and the maidens)](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/pierre-cecile-puvis-de-chavannes-death-and-the-maidens)  
> [Odilon Redon (nasturtiums)](https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/8862)  
> [Paul Signac (our lady of the guard)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437672)  
> [Auguste Rodin (three shades)](http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/collections/sculptures/three-shades)
> 
> The poem I wrote for this fic and then translated twice:  
> (Norsk) som gull, glitrende og skimrende, solnedgangen gjennom vinduet vaskes over veggene. jeg står og hører på bøkene, for de har stille ord å si, som ikke kan høres før lyset skinner over dem.   
> (Français) comme l'or, scintillant et chatoyant, le coucher de soleil à travers la fenêtre est lavé sur les murs. [Je me tiens et] j'écoute les livres, car ils ont des mots tranquilles à dire, qui ne peuvent être entendues tant que la lumière ne les éclaire pas.  
> (English) like gold, glittering and shimmering, the sunset through the window is washed over the walls. I am [standing and] listening to the books, for they have quiet words to say, which cannot be heard until the light shines over them.


	3. Partie Trois. La floraison

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience, thank you for your comments, thank you (you know who you are) for your cheerleading. Love you, enjoy.

It’s incredibly sunny when Laurent wakes up in his bedroom at the estate. Mid-spring in the north of Vere is usually filled with light rains and pale, blue-grey skies, but this abnormally bright morning almost taunts Laurent now. He rolls over in bed, back to the window, and wishes the weather would better match his mood. 

His mind feels unnaturally blank, and has felt this way ever since his return from Patras. He could barely bring himself to feign a smile when Maman met him at the door. He wants to melt into the mattress and never wake up.

Laurent bites his lip instead, and looks balefully at the side of his chest of drawers, a little scratch in the wood that sits there. How did he ever think he could get away with it all? He’d constructed a scandal with an Akielon, he’d left for the countryside, and then to a different nation altogether, and yet he still found himself back where it all began, as if he’d always been tethered to this place, never quite managing to break the string. He’ll be expected to go to all the parties and balls again now. He’ll be expected to find a suitable partner. Laurent pulls the covers over his head, swathing himself in darkness.

Auguste flings the sheets off his bed. “We’re going for a ride. Your tack is still in the stable.”

Laurent shoots a glare at his brother, sitting up. “Still a complete arse, I see,” he grumbles, to which Auguste only grins.

They trot around the fields for a short time; Laurent quickly eases back into his rhythms, every so often leaning forward to stroke his horse along her neck. He’d thought he would never see her again. He really thought he’d never return to Vere again, but here he is, riding the same horse and sleeping in the same room, eating the same meals. No matter how hard he tries, nothing changes. 

Auguste eventually comes up alongside him; Laurent watches their horses nod their heads at each other like they’re nobles at a royal dinner. 

“As pleasant as it is to see you back,” Auguste says, “it is worse to see you so defeated. Are things really so bad?”

Laurent looks down at his horse’s mane. He hasn’t really given thought to putting the situation in such plain terms as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as much as they certainly swing towards the latter. He supposes he just put so much stock into his plans unfolding correctly that he hadn’t left room for wanting to help Damen, after. For hurting Damen, eventually. For more. He gently pulls his horse to a stop, and changes approach.

“What is there to do, Auguste,” Laurent asks quietly. Auguste is tilting his head when Laurent looks up. “I mean, surely there’s more you’d like to do than ride around the estate, and occasionally go into town to sleep with people, right?”

Auguste looks amused. “Are you going to be like father now? Ask me sternly where I see my life going in ten years?” Laurent frowns, and Auguste sighs, reaching to pat his horse’s neck. “I’ve already had sufficient learning of the estate and father’s title. All that’s left is for him to die, and then I can inherit it all. In the meantime, Laurent, I just live. That’s all.”

Laurent looks away to the tree-line, the little walled plot where the graveyard is. Auguste swerves up close enough to reach over and pat him on the shoulder, just like his horse.

“You could always join the clergy,” he says with a smirk. Laurent bites down a bark of a laugh and throws a punch at his brother.

At Auguste’s insistence, Laurent attends one of the more local balls; smaller in size, but necessarily composed of the nobility currently housed at estates sufficiently removed from the city, and therefore slightly more elite. Laurent is initially tempted to wear the worst outfit possible, but it comes to an hour before their departure from the house and he can’t even bring himself to rebel properly. He puts on a jet black suit with black ascot, and doesn’t smile at the joke his mother tries to make when he comes downstairs. ‘I thought it was forecast to be a clear night, and yet a stormcloud has appeared,’ she says with a quirk to her lips, and if Laurent was less tired he might even quip back but – there’s no point in it anymore. 

He’s even less inclined to good humour at the ball itself, and dances a single set only with his mother, to fully embody the temperamental sulk of a formerly disgraced son. As he retrieves drinks for himself and his mother, he overhears a conversation between two socialites, the sweeping bows on their dresses brushing against the tablecloth. Laurent fully intends to turn away with his drinks until he hears a familiar title.

“– _and_ he was present at the very same showing as that Portrait of Monsieur X –”

A coo of interest interrupted. “Oh, could you imagine? It was the whole talk of the society for three days afterwards.”

“Although Georges confessed that neither he nor Henri saw anything of the portrait to be deemed so special.” Laurent bristled at this. His hands gripped the glasses tightly to keep from spilling them. “Just another prince of the countryside,” she says, voice lilting, “engaging in – ha! _Standard fare_ , I should say.”

Laurent exhales smoothly through his nose, and takes his leave of the unwitting company. It’s a notion he hadn’t heard in such terms before, but it still irks him; these girls floating along through their glamourous lives, witnessing scandals and yet finding ever more ways to be unimpressed with them by the end. 

He stays in a dimly lit corner until Maman collects him for their carriage ride home. He slips into bed instantly, only bothering to shed his coat and ascot and pins before collapsing into the sheets; when he wakes in the night to drag his braces off his shoulders he stares up at his dark ceiling, drifting in the half-state between sleep and waking. He imagines he can feel the lightest whisper of a brush of fingers across his cheek, and thinks of plain linen fabric bunching underneath his palm, the heat of solid flesh pressing up from beneath.

Laurent’s father frowns at him when he accidentally clatters his knife against the edge of his plate during a dinner the same week, and Laurent wants to hurl the whole cutlery set into the fireplace. Maman clears her throat primly.

“Laurent should come with me to Arles this coming week,” she says, the effect of her tone sliding the sentence from suggestion into statement. Father nods gruffly, and doesn’t say anything. Laurent can’t remember if he put on his lavender powder this morning but he espies a smudge of it on his blue coat cuff. He had barely worn any while in Patras; he’d been too caught up with the city, with Damen. A sudden wave of guilt lurches down his spine at the memory of his flirtations during his own portrait sitting in Arles, applying powder to ridiculous effect on Damen’s cheeks, the brightness of his skin shrouded under pale white. 

Auguste places his wine glass down on the table with slightly too much force, earning his own frown from their father. He catches Laurent’s eye and pinches his lips, scrunching his nose, a face he used to make when they were both much younger, just children playing nonsense at the table to relieve themselves of the boredom. Some of the tension creeps out of his chest at it, the kindliness.

“An evening in Arles would be splendid, Maman,” Laurent says.

She quirks her lips into a sly smile. “I was rather thinking broad daylight for this outing,” she says. 

Laurent chances a look at his father, only to find him engrossed in cutting his fish, as if there is nothing that could be less interesting than the current discussion. He had always been thus, at least in Laurent’s view; a stern and serious man with little time for the pleasantries of having a family. He’d allowed Laurent’s request for a portrait almost certainly due to the novelty of the business transaction, or the investment that could be made in this particular application of the arts. Auguste had had more stimulating interaction with their father during his youth, as the heir of the title, and Laurent had merely been left to his own devices. As always.

When they do go into town, it’s a late morning imbued with the certain crispness of air that precedes the onset of true autumn in Vere. Laurent is viscerally reminded of the trips into town last year; although not accompanied by his father or brother, he is almost surprised when they stop the carriage not outside of the narrow, brick studio building, but a light stone facade. 

His lips part a little as he recognizes the place, the same entryway and cramped rooms, seeming much smaller then they did when he was eight. Maman guides him silently through the corridors, her black tweed skirt swaying with each step, brushing against the dust of the wall. They emerge in the classroom to find a semi-circle of women, each arranged in front of their own easel, all focussed entirely on the model in the centre, a lady enrobed in a fine, pale pink silk dress, short and puffed evening sleeves more commonly found almost four decades ago if he remembered the old fashion plates in Maman’s study correctly. 

Maman walks towards the window, slowly in her meander, hovering for just a second behind each artist, observing the path of their neat charcoal lines as they delineate the folds of the dress on the model. The delicate shadows underneath the lace trim, the sharp crease of each pleat. As Laurent follows his mother he sees each study in turn, near perfectly mirroring their angle of the model. 

“Such precision,” he remarks, leaning against the sill when he reaches the window.

Maman’s mouth curves into her soft smile, a glint of pride in her eyes. “They’re wonderful.”

In no more than ten minutes, the class seems to end, the model giving instructions to the women about washing hands at the sink, where to put their work, next week’s class. She swishes over to where they stand near the back of the room, holding back the width of her skirts with her hands as she passes between easels. She beams at Laurent’s mother.

“Lovely to see you, Madame,” the model says, before turning to Laurent. “And the young Monsieur. How do you find your witnessing of the class?”

“The students are progressing well,” says Maman. “I should be surprised if we do not see a few of their works at the salon in the next couple years.”

The model hums at this. Laurent suspects she is also the teacher of the studio. He finds his eyes slipping away from his mother’s conversation, observing instead the rest of the room. A fair number of canvases lined the far wall, all propped against each other like cards in a set. A door stood ajar leading into a closet; Laurent could see the corner of another ruffle peeking out, lemon yellow fabric gleaming out of the darkness in the light from the windows. He shifts his gaze to the floor, his jaw tense all of a sudden, a tightness welling up in his throat.

He and Maman stay for the beginning of another class, this one with oils. The smell of turpentine fills his head with a piercing ache but they linger to watch the brushstrokes take form, each swipe edging closer to recreating the new model, a woman dressed in a man’s beige suit. 

After a small lunch in the tearoom of the Grand Hotel, the trip home clears Laurent’s head. Maman sits across from him with her book open in her lap but never turns a page, instead looking in between the rolling view out the window and Laurent’s own gaze. She keeps giving him the indulgent smiles of the doting mother she’d rarely been during his childhood. Or rather, she had doted on him in ways which were less enabling of his boyish fancies and more encouraging in as of yet unknown interests. Laurent considers the lump still lodged in his throat, the yellow dress in the studio closet.

“So you’ve,” he starts, but somehow he’d forgotten to plan the rest of his sentence. He coughs into the back of his fist. “The studio is a school, of sorts?” he asks instead.

Maman turns from the window to smile at him again, finally closing her book. “Yes. A school of the arts,” she says. “For young ladies.”

Laurent represses the urge to bite his lip. When did he get into the habit of doing that? “I can’t imagine such a school to be run with city funds,” he says, very much leading the question.

“No, I imagine not,” says Maman. Laurent flicks his eyes to her little beaded purse where it sits next to her on the carriage seat, and back to his mother. She raises an eyebrow.

“I see,” Laurent says finally, to which Maman quietly replies, “Good,” and no more is said on the matter. They do share a look as they enter the house in the mid-afternoon, and Laurent confirms to Auguste that they had a pleasant time in the city, but Laurent only thinks of the sheen of pink silk as he drifts off to sleep, his hand tucked up by his mouth.

\---

Damen wakes as if from a coma, a deep breath sucked into his lungs almost by force, stealing him from his slumber with a violence that makes his heart race as he sits up. The sheets pool at his hips, but they’re light and wispy things that provide cover but no warmth, a quality completely necessary in the hot Isthiman summer, as early in the season as it is. Damen wipes a hand over his face, tugs on the sheet, and slips out of bed.

It had been his father’s idea, surprisingly, to go to Isthima. Damen had returned from Patras in even more of a fuming haze than he had for his return from Vere, his jaw refusing to unclench, brow eternally furrowed. He hadn’t found the note until several hours after Laurent had left, which was all the time it took for Damen to muster the courage to enter the second bedroom, to see folded paper on the neatly made bed. He had read the apology, felt the same guilt through the ink as he felt in his own heart, and folded it back up. They had both been fools. 

Jokaste had been even more considerate this time, in a strangely hesitant manner, almost as if she could incur a wrath from Damen that even she could not surmount. Damen recalls spending a hazy amount of time thinking about his old teacher, picking up the blade by its leather handle and sitting it in Damen’s hand to slash his canvas. If only they could have burned the oil paints without the danger of toxins, then he would be left with only warm, clean ashes instead of the ragged strips that seem to mock his failures.

His father had suggested trying something outside of Damen’s usual purview, hence Isthima, and his recent studies of hills and cliffs and clouds. Landscapes had always seemed too impersonal to Damen, but now he finds he can take comfort in the detachment; there is no one to complain when he paints a gnarled oak clinging to the side of a dusty hill in perfect likeness.

The winds pick up more in the morning here, instead of in the hot and dry afternoon when the breeze is more sorely needed, so Damen takes his walk after he gets out of bed, just to feel the wind rush through his hair, billowing his shirt and rushing around his arms like a boisterous dog. Bazal hadn’t been close enough to the ocean for this kind of weather, but it had had its own kind of heat tempered by cooler mornings. In those couple weeks before the – the _culmination_ of everything, as he tends to refer to it in his mind, Damen had indulged in fantasies of stepping across the hall and into Laurent’s room in the glow before sunrise, to slide through the cool air to rest lips and hands and all manner of skin along him, warm them both to comfort. Wake them both up together into the embrace of daylight. 

How mocking to have one’s fantasies both made and dashed within the span of a blink. Laurent’s note hadn’t needed to be explicit in his disregard for their ever possibly meeting again, and so Damen finds himself, frankly, wishing for a fortuitous end to all his troubles in the ridiculously picturesque landscape of Isthima. Perhaps he should get a dog.

Damen makes the trek out to the low slope of the beach today, rather than the cliffs. He likes the small thrill of the unsteady feeling of the sand and pebbles shifting and sinking under his feet, that he must keep moving forward in order to not lose all balance. A leg of his small box easel digs into his ribs while he finds a suitable place to set up, trying to get an angle of the beach he hasn’t already looked at for hours already. Damen sighs and sets his equipment down, arranges his portable workspace, and just paints.

Just as Damen glances away from the tufts of grass forming on his canvas, he spots a movement in the water. A small head pokes above the surface, then dips back down just as smoothly – a seal. Damen pauses, just to watch. The seal dips up and down a few more times, approaching the shore, until it begins to emerge fully, heaving itself up onto the sand with its forelimbs. Damen is loathe to take his eyes off it but reaches down to his pack despite this feeling, retrieving loose paper and a pencil. The seal has squirmed its way firmly onto somewhat solid land, casting a blank look over its shoulder at Damen from several metres away.

“A better model I could not find,” Damen says aloud, lips quirking into a smile. He traces pencil over paper in practiced motions until his back starts to hurt from how he’s leaning around his easel to get a better look. The seal fidgets with its pose and snorts rudely when Damen adjusts the stool so he has a clear view, and he returns to the sketch, starting to delineate the flippers, tail, snout. 

By the time his stomach has started to complain about a lack of lunch break, Damen has amassed a little collection of pencil sketches of the seal. He gives a dismissive glance to his neglected painting. Landscapes are certainly not his future, if his attention is so easily pulled away like this. A second seal comes up from the water to meet the first, and Damen slowly packs up his things. Three’s a crowd, after all.

The hike back to the house is uneventful, save for a short greeting to the postman on his donkey. Damen has a letter waiting for him, apparently, but with all that has come from unexpected mail recently, he thinks it could probably sit for a while. Just until he’s ready. When he reaches the house, Damen fixes a plate of whichever pickings he can find in the pantry and collapses into a chair out under the pergola with a glass and a dusty little bottle of tsipouro. He takes a deep breath in and holds it for a moment, closing his eyes.

Occasionally, Damen recalls the exact feeling of confusion he experienced when he started learning Veretian, the twisted knot in his mind that he could never unravel at first, how the conjugations and tenses and forms had all looped around each other and contradicted each other, slipping out of his grasp each time he thought he had a hold of it. He could admit, Akielon had its own tricks and peculiarities, but Veretian had felt like a coiled trap just waiting to spring, ensnaring the hapless learner at a moment’s vicious whim. Of course, looking back on it, Damen sees now how the language had simply been constructed with a certain architecture in mind, with no particularly cruel or evil intent at all, just communication that differed from his mother tongue at an intrinsic level. Damen takes a sip of his tsipouro.

But this confusion, borne of grammar and syntax, with the promise of knowledge always just managing to slide out of his fingers, had risen time and time again, even after he had finally caught the sly beast that was the Veretian language. He had felt it surface in all those interactions with Laurent, how they had been made of much grander substance than they appeared, and yet Damen would always be at a loss for where to search for the hint, the little wink that let him know there was more afoot. Sometimes he thought he had caught it, a flash out of the corner of his eye, gone when he turned his gaze, but – Damen thinks now that perhaps he had misunderstood again, tackling the problem from a perspective inherently contrasting to the correct angle. 

Laurent’s note of apology. That had been the key, he thinks, taking a piece of cheese from his plate. Like a novice thinking too far ahead in a game of tactics, making too many assumptions about an opponents moves before they’ve even sat down at the table, and waylaid from the outset. They had both been guilty of it, too entangled with the wrong set of roots that they’d forgotten about the flowers above. 

He opens the letter later, after retrieving it from the box out front and letting it sit on the table in the hall as if in emotional quarantine. From the writing on the outside of the envelope it looks like it’s been rerouted from home, forwarded by one of his family to where they know he is at the moment. With a steeling inhale, Damen tears open the flap and tugs the paper out, only to find a missive from his oldest friend. A weight is lifted from around his heart at the request.

It only takes a couple of weeks for Damen to send back a response, send a note to his family of his plans, and then follow his own letter up to Delpha. His things pack up easily, as they always have for this strange little life on the road he’s created for himself. The series of carriages follow the coast up to Marlas, the sea ever on his left, and he thinks wryly of all the different landscape paintings he could do just from the window of the carriage. He does make a notable sketch of a pair of donkeys and a horse tied up just outside a milliner’s shop in one of the small towns they stop at along the route; they’re arranged in such a perfectly captivating tableau, the hats framed in the shop window are completely ignored by the animals for a bucket of grain or some such, their bags and saddle cloths practically dripping off their backs with the weight of purchases to be brought back home. It reminds him in a roundabout way of the sketches he made while in Patras, which he admits might have been some of his best, with all the practice he had there. He hasn’t opened up his sketchbook past the first page since Isthima, though, too afraid to revisit some of the sketches inside. Evidence of his own vulnerabilities.

Nikandros Laskaris, the kyros of Delpha himself, meets him at the town centre of the port of Marlas, in all his glory. When he sees Damen he throws his arms wide and, in the manner of a truly untroubled and well-fed man, hugs Damen and heaves him around in a half-circle, as if they’re still boys and Nik still has a couple years worth more muscle on him. 

“Damianos,” He says, stretching the vowels out slowly with a grin. “No boat?”

“Scenic route,” Damen says. Nik moves to relieve him of his measly luggage but Damen swings it out of reach with a shake of his head. “They’re no bother. To yours, then?”

“To mine,” Nik replies, and with a heavy slap of his hand on Damen’s back, they shuffle into another carriage. Damen is astonished at the low pitch of Nik’s voice now; he only remembers the young, barely post-pubescent tones they both had at eighteen, or twenty in Nik’s case. He hears Nik talk without listening for most of their ride toward his home, and only collects himself as they round the last bend in the road, Nik’s manor house looming into view, just in time to hear “– the twins will love the portrait, I promise you, ever since your letter they’ve been simply impossible, refusing to sleep, to bathe, anything but _model_ , it’s probably having unspeakable effects on their self image.” Nik laughs, a deep and happy thing. Damen can’t help but smile in return at such contentedness.

Two young girls, a round woman with a baby on her hip, and an elderly couple dressed all in black stand just outside of the front entryway as the carriage slows to a stop in the circular drive. From the window Damen can see the two girls – who look to be slightly older than Elisabet, perhaps around ten or so – bound up to the carriage step with utmost glee, and so he allows Nik to open the door and descend first. He looks all too pleased to be swarmed by his children, as much as two girls counts as a swarm, but at least Damen can exit the carriage and get his luggage handed down to him from the rack before he’s set upon. 

“Uncle Damen! We’ve heard so much about you! We can’t hardly wait – can’t _wait_ – until you paint our portrait, it’ll be so lovely – I’ve got dresses picked out and everything – me too! And I–”

They each cling to one of his arms, just holding on and babbling away as they all move slowly towards the house, even more ecstatic than Elisabet can work herself up to. Before he can even send Nik a silent plea for rescue, the woman with the baby leans away from where Nik had been giving her a kiss on the cheek to say, “Girls! Let Damianos breathe; come here.”

The girls huff a little, but step over to their mother nonetheless. Nik gestures grandly at them from Damen’s side. “Let me introduce you, my oldest and dearest friend, who lives too far away for all that is good – no need to glare! My wife, Sofia; my twin wind storms, Leodora and Antonia, and,” he shifts his arm to illuminate the black-clad duo still standing by the entrance with polite smiles, “Head butler and housekeeper, Mr and Mrs Pavlides.”

“We’re delighted to have you,” Sofia says in the most essential of congenial tones, just as one of the twins abruptly bounces to the side and says, waving a hand at the infant in her mother’s arms, “And baby Nicola!”

Nik laughs and agrees, “Yes, _and_ our very own little turnip, Nicola. Now let’s let Damen start his relaxation.” He pats Damen on the back and somehow they all manage to get inside the house.

Perhaps it’s the extended stay in relative isolation on Isthima, or perhaps Nikandros’ family is just especially exuberant in their familial love for each other, but either way Damen finds himself presented with enthusiasm and vigour directed at all possible amiable ventures around nearly every corner of the manor. It’s so different from the quiet, dare he say subtle way that his own family shows their love, all contented silences and occasional quiet teasing. Nik seems to have carved out a little piece of the world here in Delpha with which to grow the happy bustling family he never really had during his own childhood. Damen knows his father and brothers had been either strict military types or solemn members of government, and although he’s now head of a provincial legislative branch, Nik has flipped that stereotype on its head, more or less. All it took was surrounding himself with a rosie-cheeked wife and many daughters, in a house with a view of the sea.

Just as he was somehow able to find small moments of satisfaction in his landscape painting endeavours, the feeling follows him here, too, but the break from any actual painting does him good. Damen is out for a walk along the grounds, completely unburdened by even his sketchbook, when he is accosted by the twins, who find all manner of ways to ask if today might possibly be the day their portrait starts. Damen fends them off with a gentle ‘not yet’, and they about-face into what seems to be a competition between themselves to show Damen their favourite flowers in the garden. After at least ten minutes of sitting on a sunlit bench and being personally delivered individually picked summer blossoms, the ‘favourites’ appear to mean ‘all of them’. Damen graciously receives every flower they deposit with him, closing his eyes in the sun and stretching out his legs, crossed at the ankles each time they run off again. When Nik comes out to announce that lunch has been sitting out, neglected, for who knows how long, he takes one look at Damen and lets out a bark of a laugh.

“Which fairies have almost suffocated you with flowers, brother?” he says. Damen squints at him until Nik comes closer and blocks out the sun. He supposes the girls have gone a little wild with placing flowers on him while he relaxed; dandelions and daisies and sweetpeas sit along his legs, larger blooms of roses and geraniums, hibiscus and lilies tucked into his crossed arms.

“I’m sure you know them quite well, let’s see . . .” Damen feigns an uncertain pondering, and mere seconds later Leodora and Antonia emerge from behind a hydrangea, giggling into their hands. The image of the two girls, dressed in their summer white dresses and surrounded by greenery ignites a tiny spark of inspiration in Damen, but he softly tucks it away. There is no need to rush, here.

A sweltering late evening finds Damen with a glass of crushed ice and lemon, sat in the cushioned wicker chair in the cool tiled sitting room, across a low table from Nikandros. Too warm to think, they sit in silence until Sofia shuffles in, just in shirtwaist and skirt now, hair frizzing out from her updo in the heat. 

She collapses onto the sofa, and Nik asks quietly from the seat next to her if the girls are finally in bed. Sofia nods tiredly and grabs for Nik’s drink, holding the glass to her cheek.

“How did you even handle two of them at the same time for nine years?” Damen asks, exhausted just from a week’s worth of proximity to them. He can’t imagine the fatigue of doing the actual parenting. 

“Marvelous question, Damen. Darling?” Nik turns to his wife. She only closes her eyes and lets out a groan, dropping her head onto the back of the sofa and holding the crushed ice out to Nik. He takes it back with a wry smile, turning back to Damen. “That seems to translate to: ‘no small amount of patience.’ I concur completely.”

“And now you have a third,” Damen says with a sympathetic grimace.

Nik waves a dismissive hand, as if swatting a fly. “Oh Nicola’s no bother, she just sits around all day. I imagine it’s not unlike having one’s ancient bedridden relative in the house, except now she quite likes to try to eat every insect she finds outside.”

“Not very ladylike, but who are we to stop her,” Sofia chimes in. Damen feels his face shift, unbidden, into an expression he thinks might answer along the lines of ‘her primary caregivers?’

Sofia lifts her head from the sofa with what looks like great effort, but pins Damen with a discerning look. “Are you feeling better now that you’ve been here for a week?”

Damen considers this for a moment. It’s a straightforward question, with an easy answer if he wants it, but as long as it has been since he’s seen Nikandros in person, his trust in him – and by extension his family – has never lessened. 

With a slow start rife with pauses and qualifications, Damen explains his situation from the beginning; the Veretian vicomte’s commission, the resulting scandal, his return home, tail between his legs. The surge of hope from the Patran merchant’s commission, and the unexpected alliance he found there. With a hitch in his breath, he glosses over the more intimate revelations of his time in Patras, but hints at the potential greater feelings he had, despite Nik’s frown. Sofia tilts her head, silently encouraging him to finish describing the abrupt split that occurred, the disposal of a month’s work, his deeply low spirits upon returning home. With a breath, it’s summarised, and Damen almost can’t bear to look up from the melting ice chips in his glass. Nik clears his throat.

“Quite the confession,” he says, much more softly than Damen had expected. He looks up to see Nik dragging a hand over his face. 

“Forgive my glumness,” Damen says, matching the tone. “But you must know how well your letter pulled me some ways out of the mire I found myself in.”

“Of course, Damen,” Sofia says sincerely, and then, more slyly, “What wonders may come of the advancement of the postal system?” She says this with a glint in her eye that reminds Damen of Jokaste, and he says a silent but tired thanks to the universe. She sends a glance over to Nik, which seems to convey something that Damen’ can’t quite interpret, but which Nik sees, and says:

“Oh no, no, don’t encourage this,” Nik frowns, hands on his knees, as if he’s about to get up.

“If he’s sure about his feelings right now, then he shouldn’t disregard them,” Sofia says. Nik grumbles instead of arguing right away, which Damen can recall from many times in their youth. Sofia looks back to Damen, hands out, entreating. “Write them out, Damen. Write some letters.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Nik warns, before being hushed by his wife’s hand patting his own. 

Damen sips at his ice, feeling his neck heat. The suggestion does sound appealing, in that he could simply just write a letter which states how he feels – or perhaps even several – to put it down in ink and potentially out of his heart for a brief, relieving moment. He wouldn’t even have to put his own address on them, wouldn’t put any burden on Laurent to reciprocate his sentiments. 

He deliberates exactly how to start sending them the next morning, as he sits in the garden with a fresh pile of sketching paper propped in his lap. The twins are playing at some sort of make-believe with a wooden spoon and a basket of flowers, and he realizes he may not be such a ruin after all, making the first sketchy lines of a lily on the page.

\---

Laurent goes on more solitary rides than accompanied ones. Each spurring of his horse to quicken their pace is another quick kick away from the house, another whooshing breeze across his face. He allows his horse to slow when she wants, just as they’re reaching the edge of a dense thicket. Her ears flick around before she bends to the long grass, and Laurent takes a minute to look over their surroundings. 

The thicket is already turning that nearly grey colour of winter, in contrast to the little blue flecks of autumn crocus dotting the edges. The clouds have been steadily accumulating over the area for the past couple days, bound to thunder down on them all soon enough, but this early in the morning there is still some sunlight glimpsing through. 

The long field reaching back to the house still seems too short a distance. He can’t see the windows of his rooms from this direction, but the tall panes of the library are easy to pick out among the grey of the exterior stone, the little ornamental trees around the perimeter, the sharp glass angles of the greenhouse. Laurent leads his horse around the thicket and closer over to the little road that cuts by the estate.

Laurent has had some thoughts, recently, about a possible future, one which would grant him the remove from society he desires, but without the ire and disparagement from either the general populace or his family. He’d recalled a distant aunt on his mother’s side who ran a horse farm in Kempt, and Laurent thinks that with some of her assistance in developmental matters, he could form something of that ilk for his own business, perhaps on his own lands in Acquitart. The plan is still forming, but soon he can assemble the pieces. Fit something of himself back together.

A shout from behind stirs him from his thoughts. Laurent twists in his seat to look back down the road. A man on horseback – no, the postman, his cap and saddle bags with the insignia of the postal service, waves an envelope at him. Laurent stills his horse to let the postman cross the distance.

“More letters for you, Monsieur,” he says genially, and Laurent frowns, but takes them from the postman regardless, when he sidles up. “Don’t know who else is getting as much Akielon post as you, Monsieur.”

The postman carries on down the road with a tip of his cap and nudging of his horse, unaware of the unnatural stillness which has overcome Laurent. He grips the hard edges of the letters in his palms, one finger sliding along the ridges of the wax seal of one of them. There’s too much to think about, suddenly; any post at all arriving from Akielos is warring with the phrase ‘ _more letters_ ’ in Laurent’s mind.

Mostly through muscle memory, Laurent breaks the seal and opens the letter, flips it around in his hands. A tidy script lays neatly on the page, and Laurent’s eyes blur over until they read the signature at the end, the same one that lives on the bottom of his own portrait.

It’s as if Laurent has been deposited into the middle of a conversation between two ghosts. There’s no context for what he’s reading, how any of it fits into the silent narrative that he’s known for these past months. Damen seems to be earnestly conveying daily matters of his activities and well-being, alongside – Laurent drops the letter to his lap, staring despondently over the road and the fields and the thicket, the trees in the distance waving in the wind. The declarations of attraction and desire smolder in his hands, surely singing the paper. He feels his face contort as if he is outside of himself, squinting his eyes, accidentally nudging his horse into a slow walk. It doesn’t matter if he can’t see, she knows where she’s going, but Laurent is crinkling the paper in his hand now, back bowing over his own lap. He opens his eyes to search for the sentence again, the awful, torturous, beautiful, wrenching sentence in which Damen says he – 

Laurent recalls with a shiver the memory of Damen’s hands sliding down his hips, his tongue licking along Laurent’s length, and tries to reconcile the singular passion of that encounter with the deepest confessions of Damen’s intimate longing resting in his hands. Laurent scrambles the letters around to find there is no location written in the heading, just a date. Laurent curses into the morning air, before studying the paper again. Further, he thinks, how many of these correspondences have not reached Laurent’s hands at all? It must be one – or possibly all – of his family behind the interceptions, no one else in the household would assume the authority to tamper with his mail in this way. 

A thought occurs to him just as he leads his horse to the stable, shifting his weight to dismount, and it is this: unless Damen has suddenly acquired a vindictiveness and initiative nearly equal to Laurent’s, these letters must contain the truth. And if they are the truths of Damen’s heart, then Laurent is not despised by him as Laurent had thought, but rather wholly the reverse. Despite all that Laurent has done, both willfully and unintentionally along the course of their association, Damen must still find it in his soul to forgive him. 

Laurent lets this gentle epiphany propel him silently through the actions of grooming his horse, and devises a plan of approach. The lack of heading address besides ‘Akielos’ at the top of the message means there is no rush; Laurent cannot hurry over to Damen if he doesn’t know where he is sending his letters from. Perhaps – it is a hint that Laurent should not make the effort to find Damen in person. Laurent’s horse shuffles a step when he abruptly pauses in his brushing. It’s fine; at this point, he would rather find Damen and have him break the spell of his own preoccupation with Laurent than to sit in Arles for eternity with the slowly curdling sense of loss he had already been starting to accept. 

Aside from the nebulous entity of both Damen’s written and unstated feelings, Laurent admits he must confront his family on the matter of the undelivered letters. It happens, of course, that afternoon, during a rare teatime which manages to assemble all four of them in the same room at the same time. 

A nervous bubble floats in his chest that they all might deny knowledge of any letters, that he’ll be left without explanation for some non-existent letters yet with an urge to find a man he’d given up hope trying to have. Laurent shoves away this notion regardless. 

“It has come to my attention,” Laurent starts, and then pauses, waits for Maman to lower her cup, Auguste to look up from his book. His father sits up straighter in his armchair. “Some member of this household has been withholding an unknown amount of postal correspondence, addressed to myself and arriving from Akielos.” He looks around the room. Auguste closes his book.

“Laurent –” Auguste starts, but is interrupted by his father.

“Is this a statement, or an accusation?” he asks, moustache twitching. His grip on the arm of his chair shifts into a fist.

Laurent holds firm. “I merely wish to know who – no, even that doesn’t matter, I would simply appreciate the return of the letters. Possibly even the reason for their vanishment, although I have an inkling of what that explanation entails.” 

“Why should you be so concerned with these letters?” Maman says. Laurent swings his gaze around, lips parting. Maman holds her hands out, entreating. “If they are from Akielos, as you say, surely they do not contain anything of interest.”

Laurent’s eyebrows lift in incredulity. “They do not–?”

“After that trouble with the painter, I would imagine even the thought of Akielos might disturb you still,” she continues. Something illuminates in Laurent’s mind, the flame of a candle suddenly lit.

“Maman,” Laurent says softly, darkly. He hears his father burst into a grumbling of annoyance, Auguste regaining his voice to calm him down. 

Maman looks at him with a strained expression of kind worry. A breath leaves Laurent’s lungs so slowly that he thinks perhaps he isn’t breathing at all anymore. 

“All this fuss over some damned letters,” his father says with a huff. Laurent keeps his eyes on Maman. “Better for them to be in the fire than to ruin us any further.”

He sees his mother’s hands fidget around her cup and saucer. “Maman, is this true?” Laurent asks. In his periphery, his father gets up and leaves the room, Auguste corralling him through the doorway. Maman’s face crumples, and she bites her top lip.

“I didn’t want to see you hurt,” she says, and sounds so small, so unlike herself. Laurent looks to the window; his nervousness from before has shifted to a different kind of uncertainty now. Betrayal seems so harsh a word for what has happened, and doesn’t convey the clear concern she has always had for him. Perhaps it is more like a shifting away from common interests, a reorganization of ideals. Laurent wants to explain everything, how he planned everything and mistook everything and how Damen still seems to want it, if his recent letter is to be believed. Laurent settles for crossing the room, and taking his mother’s hand in his own.

“I’m not,” he says. He bites back the word ‘never’, because perhaps that isn’t strictly true.

“You were before,” Maman says, stroking her thumb over the back of his hand. “And when you came back, I could tell. You weren’t yourself.”

Laurent pauses for a moment to consider how much of ‘himself’ he’s ever been around other people, especially as the distance from childhood grew. This is not the time. “Regardless, I should be the one to decide that for myself,” he says. “You understand that I have to – I’m going to leave. For Akielos.”

Maman lets Laurent’s hand slip from her grip. “I do,” she says with a brief nod. Laurent rocks back as she stands, smooths the front of her dress, collecting herself back into the poised and perfectly composed vicomtesse. 

When he returns to his rooms, Laurent stops to place a hand on the soft wood of his bedpost. The emotional tumult of the past couple days finally crests and subsides in his chest, releasing with a deep exhale. He closes his eyes. No time for this.

He still has an Akielon address for Damen tucked away with the documents from the portrait commission; whether it is Damen’s current address or not, it’s certainly a start. Despite what his family thinks, Laurent never held anger for Damen, as he had been in full knowledge of Damen’s innocence in all matters. Laurent had been the ruiner, the indecent manipulator, the pull into the conflict. That Damen was willing to put to paper and then _send_ to Laurent his admissions of his feelings surely meant more than forgiveness for Laurent’s transgressions. 

It doesn’t take long to assemble the necessities for the trip. A carriage to the coast, then tickets for the sailing to Ios, and Laurent needs only the essentials he brought with him to Patras to sustain him. He spares a thought to all but those two of Damen’s letters, lost to the fire, and after he parts from his embrace with Auguste, he moves to Maman, where she stands by the doorjamb.

Laurent knows there is no call to be cruel, but he needs to know before he leaves, so he wraps his arms around her shoulders too, and asks, into the quiet of her cheek, “Are you even sorry?”

Maman digs her chin into his shoulder at this, clutches her hands to the back of his coat. When they step back, she has hard steel in her eyes, confident and unyielding. Laurent lingers for a moment, hoping she might respond, either give him the relief of saying yes, or the verdict of a no, but she doesn’t. As Laurent climbs into the carriage and the door is shut behind him, he looks back at the house; all he sees is the dark wood of the door as it closes, the grey autumn clouds reflected in the windows. Laurent turns back to face forwards, and tries to imagine what Ios in the fall will be like.

\---

After a mere six weeks in the Laskaris household, Damen has finally learned how to tell Leodora and Antonia apart. 

His improved insight is not wholly due to the sheer number of sketches he makes of them in the lead up to the portrait; the girls have their own subtle expressions which finally separate themselves in Damen’s mind. Antonia has a way of tilting her head down and folding her lips when she concentrates, whereas Leodora wears a mask of almost blank acknowledgement of the problem she’s trying to solve. Antonia hovers close to whichever adult is closest indoors, and while this tends to be either her mother or the governess, there are brief moments when the role slides onto Damen. He’d been picking up various books in the drawing room one evening with no intention of really reading them when a quiet shuffle had sounded just behind him, leading after a jolt of shock to Antonia with her thumb in her mouth, practically tucked under his arm already. When he’d nervously escorted her to the hall where he’d seen Sofia last, he’d found Leodora there too, in matching nightgown, hugging a soft toy lion. 

There’s a slight difference in their features as well, but it’s a close thing. The revelation of their barely different eye-shape came to Damen only during his fifth sketch of them, a miraculous session in which they both took it upon themselves to act as ‘proper models,’ in their own words, and so sat deathly still, faces forward and severe, for approximately ten entire minutes before something else distracted them entirely. Nik had wandered into the room four minutes into the sitting and made an expression of such astonishment at the calmness of his children that he had backed out quite silently, likely afraid of disrupting the rare moment of peace. After the ten minutes was concluded, the twins sprang up like crickets in long grass, and begged to know each of the colours of paints he’d brought with him.

Damen is out in the garden again, the weather slightly overcast for once, when Sofia comes by with a glass of fresh lemonade. He’s taken a brief pause in his studies of the twins to focus on flowers, practicing the irregular shapes and curls of petals and leaves, scrutinizing the shadows in amongst them. It’s calming, focussing on just these small pieces of nature, certainly not as involved as his attempts at proper landscapes. He leans to the side to allow Sofia a peek over his shoulder at his sketchbook, and she hums appreciatively.

“I’ll do some watercolours next, I think,” he says offhandedly, to fill the silence. It’s on his usual list of portrait preparations, a step he tends to quite enjoy as he finalises the poses in his mind, and the lighting of them.

Sofia shifts back and props her forearm on his shoulder. “Could I keep them after, as well?” She asks, all gleaming smile. Damen returns it, nodding, until her expression softens, tilts. “You did all this for Laurent, too?”

Damen’s chest clenches, his throat closing, something stuck in it. He did do all this for Laurent, as he has done for most of his other portraits; all those sketches and watercolours left . . . somewhere, he’s not sure. There had been too much of a blur around himself between the salon and arriving home, and he hadn’t bothered to sort through the papers in his luggage upon his return. 

On the other hand, he is quite sure of the whereabouts of his Patras sketches. Those endless studies of Laurent’s profile just never stopped, apparently, interspersed with rough lines of Laurent paying for bread at the Bazal market, Laurent haggling with the greengrocer. His crisp, well-fitted suits, while covering much more than necessary in the heavy heat of Patras, had left little to the imagination regarding his natural silhouette, something Damen had of course noticed already in Vere, but which he had been reawakened to in their prolonged time together. That his looks had lingered even longer in informality than when he had been professionally required to do nothing but stare at Laurent – well.

Sofia is still looking at him, though, hands on her hips, eyebrow quirked, and so Damen wets his lips, clears his throat, and says, “Yes, I did. Uh, for him too.”

It would be dangerous to look at her now, and so he picks his pencil back up and refocuses on the carnation bush in front of him. The pale pink of the blooms bounce on the end of each branch as the breeze catches it. Damen makes another couple mindless lines of pencil.

"When Nik first told me he had a painter friend, I didn't believe him,” Sofia says, shifting her weight to the other hip in Damen’s peripheral. “And even then, I thought you might be some wispy little fragile thing, _un artiste_ , you know," she says in Veretian. 

Damen huffs an embarrassed laugh. "I'm really just a big strong fragile thing, instead," he says. 

"Far from _un artiste_ , though, which is all that matters," Sofia consoles. "But I can see why Nik respects you. You have learned to command the armies of pencil lines and paint strokes.” She extends a finger towards the carnations on his page. “They do your every bidding! Such true, realistic art marches forth from your hand."

Damen is not unused to compliments, or even flattery, but the military comparison catches him by surprise. He’d never thought of his art as being particularly regimented or orderly, although perhaps there is a truth to Sofia’s words, in that his hands are able to follow his eyes. He concedes her point with a nod of his head, almost a bow. “Thank you.”

He continues to think about what Sofia said for the rest of his time in the garden, and well into the evening, as he lights a candle to pen another letter to Laurent. He admits it has been somewhat freeing to lay his thoughts out like this, pen to paper, but Damen pauses at the end of the first sentence, considering his hand. 

Gripping a pencil, a paintbrush, a piece of canvas, those actions are most familiar. He stretches his fingers out, palm open and upwards, and all he can see are the lines forged into it from years of work. He’d had more calluses, before, when he used to make his own frames. 

Damen thinks about how Laurent had felt, in that upper room in Bazal, the rasp of hair under Damen’s short nails, the softness of his hips, his stomach. He’s not a stranger to giving pleasure with his hands either, stroking and molding and pressing. A flash of perfect jawline, that cunning visage curled to the side in rhapsody. Damen clenches his fingers in again, inhaling unevenly.

What else have his hands done? Shaken others in business, flattened his niece’s hair, carried a fresh-caught fish or a side of lamb, poked risen dough. Held his mother’s portrait, felt the points of rosemary sprigs, opened doors. Damen stops himself before he can think of how it might feel, on his hands, to give this letter to Laurent in person. It would be too much, all at once, to see his face again and – no, it’s better not to know, whether Laurent tosses these into the fire or not, whether he could even bear to see Damen in his field of view.

Moreover, the letters, Damen has firmly decided, are the way to relinquish Laurent to memory. He can’t truly admit to knowing the man well enough anymore, in either of their current states. Although, he sometimes wishes that he could have specific moments with Laurent, simple glimpses of lives they could have alongside one another, he knows inside himself that he should loosen his grip. The portrait was not the man, after all. 

Sofia determinedly sets a dinner party for the weekend, and Damen embraces the opportunity to distract himself from what yia-yia Gerotsis back home might melodramatically call ‘the spectres of his past’. In a quiet moment of softness, Nik tells him that there won’t be that many people, just some friends from the town, Damen won’t have to talk about his work if he doesn’t want to, but Damen manages a smile, fits his hand onto the side of Nik’s neck and says, “Don’t worry about me, Nik. Don’t worry.”

The last time he wore a proper evening jacket must have been at the Beaux-Arts, he thinks. They don’t entertain at his family’s home, or rather, if they do it never requires anything approaching black tie dress. The suit doesn’t feel strange, though, different as it may be from his casual attire. Damen wishes he had brought a nicer tie pin, his best silk waistcoat, but when he descends the stairs to the party, welcomed by Nik’s warm smile, he forgets all about that.

The guests are a much wider assortment than Damen had expected when he follows Nik through the sitting room door and out to the canopy-covered section of terrace garden. Damen nearly stumbles over a pair of instrument cases propped up near the doorway, and as he recovers his footing he spies a quick glimpse of a sheathed sword hanging off the belt of the man currently talking to Sofia. A pair of men with matching blue gloves laugh suddenly and loudly to his right, clinking wine glasses, and a dark-skinned woman in a brocade evening gown and headscarf tilts a climbing rose towards her face with delicate fingers. The twins, let loose to run rampant through the pre-dinner scene, alight on the garden swing with a young boy around their age, any piece of fabric below their knees already smudged with grass stains.

Damen takes a deep breath to let the tableau sink in in his mind. The sun is still in the sky, not due to set for another hour or so, but several candle lights flicker on the tabletops already, the overhead lamps waiting to be lit once the dark truly settles in. The colours of everything in this light seem more deep and saturated somehow, as if the evening has taken it upon itself to assist in the luxuriation. He could probably mix a palette of just this, given enough time, and construct a painting of the essence of being in Marlas, with good friends and those who will soon be so, his stomach awaiting the rich smells emanating from within the house. A portrait of anticipatory comfort.

The party progresses to dinner not too long after, and Damen is met with soups and quails and pastries full of rich spices; such a sumptuous first couple courses that he only introduces himself to the guests on either side as a spicy cucumber and pickle salad is being set down. The man belonging to the violin he almost stepped on sits to Damen’s left, and makes no worry of Damen’s admittance of the near-accident, as apparently it happens all the time. The grey in his short moustache remind Damen of his own father a little, and he can’t help but smile at all points of conversation.

The woman to his left introduces herself as Cecilia and begins to rambunctiously describe the set of stars just starting to emerge in the clear and darkening sky above them when Damen turns to her. He doesn’t understand many of the terms she uses, about eclipses and ions and elemental compositions, but that doesn’t necessarily stop him from encouraging her spiel, the light from the candles sparkling in her eyes as she speaks. 

It seems as if Nik and Sofia have certainly held their promise of gathering all manner of folk to their table this evening. He’s only asked twice where his interests lie, and it’s simple enough to say he paints portraits, does sketches. Leodora and Antonia find him on one of these occasions, and steal the attention to proclaim that he’s currently painting a portrait of them, all excitement and childish frenzy, their now bare feet energetically stamping around on the grass.

And later, Damen himself comes to stamp around the grass, as, once the dessert has been savoured and the plates carried into the house, an accordion is unpacked, along with the violin, striking up the most merry of Akielon folk tunes. After only a blink of a moment he knows it’s Antonia who pulls on his hand first, into the centre of a slowly growing dancing circle where his other hand is taken up by Leodora, and they all three start the motions for the dance, which quickly turns into a flying whirl of dresses and laughter, grasping hands to spin around with, feet crossing over each other with each step. 

Contained within the wind storm of the dance, the strains of the instruments increasing in pace, along with the claps of the dance, Damen can only see flashes of the world outside, almost as if he’s one of Cecilia’s stars and all the rest of the party orbits around him at high velocity, hurtling around without crashing, his hands in the grip of the twins and a new feeling of relief in his chest. With a rush – that could very well be due to the sudden stop, or the wine in his veins – the song ends, and Damen smiles into the realization that he would like for Marlas to be his new home.

\---

If Laurent were still of the persuasion of his social fellows of Veretian nobility, he might describe the ensuing donkey-pulled cart ride after his arrival into the Ios outskirts via public carriage as ‘quaint’, or perhaps even ‘whimsical’. As it happens, however, the only word he can think of as the farmer’s cart sweeps him further away from any notion of a proper city and towards the small town of Damen’s habitation, is ‘suspenseful’. 

The dust from the dry summer-baked roads billows up around the wheels, and Laurent has to pull his scarf up over his nose to minimise the amount attempting to invade his lungs. He also hadn’t managed to maintain more than a confirmation of the town name from the farmer without succumbing to his own weaknesses regarding the comprehension of the more isolated dialects of the Akielon language. Thus he has no choice but to sit in silence and anticipate the prospect of seeing Damen again. Or not seeing him. It’s a matter of great and acute turmoil currently lodging itself as a pit in his stomach.

He disembarks at a turn in the road, the one fork of which the farmer carries down to his steading, the other leading to Laurent’s fate. He kicks himself for being so in the habit of such internal dramatics and picks up his small trunk and carpet bag, setting off down the way. 

The first couple houses he passes by don’t seem uninhabited, per se, but rather closed off. It’s not until he can see the possibility of a single, tall clock tower in the distance that he comes across a house, slightly set back from the road, with an old woman sitting in the shade of its entranceway. A young girl is running around the grasses in front, flapping her arms like some sort of bird, her knees hiking up with each step. He can’t even begin to guess at what she might be playing make-believe of, but he slows, the unevenly weighted end of his trunk swaying down to trail along the ground in the bounce of his grip. 

As soon as the girl catches sight of him her eyes go wide and she dashes to the woman, crying out “Yia-yia!” on her way. The old woman rises from her chair and considers him with an expression of utmost equanimity. Laurent feels an instinctive spike of guilt for making her stand.

“Hello,” he says. “I’m looking for someone who lives in this area?” He sets his luggage down at his feet, where he stands in the short narrow path from the road to the door. The woman narrows her eyes and says something in an accent which Laurent has no chance of possibly comprehending. He raises his hands in imploration, and also to prove his relative innocence; the girl, he notes, is trying to simultaneously hide behind the woman and get a full and unobstructed view of the proceedings.

A name might help, Laurent thinks. “Damianos Theomedou?” The old woman lights up, though, and strangely enough, so does the girl. “Where might I find him?” he wagers, in his terribly academic Akielon. He strains to listen to any kind of answer.

“Damianaki, sweet boy,” she says, followed by something that sounds like the words ‘not painting’ and ‘not here’. 

“Damia– Damen, he’s not here?” Laurent asks. The woman shakes her head firmly. But this town was definitely where Damen should be, or at least where he was a year ago. And the note that he isn’t painting, that definitely doesn’t sit right either. 

The girl flicks her eyes down the road, and then back to frown at Laurent. She tugs on the skirt of the woman’s dress and mumbles something unintelligible. The woman shushes her with a universally patient ‘ _not now, Liyabeta_ ’, and Laurent lets out the sigh he’d barely been holding back for hours now.

“The painter, you will find, in the town,” he thinks the old woman says, and she’s pointing a knobbly finger down the road, so he offers her a beleaguered smile and his thanks and starts off. The exhaustion from the travel is truly setting in, but he places one foot in front of the other, his trunk and bag in either hand, the weight of them making him feel like he could sink into the dusty earth itself.

By the time Laurent reaches a wide open plaza in town, walled off on three sides by a small bar with café tables, an arched gate leading under the clock tower, and a set of what might be apartments, he’s aching with thirst. No one told him the heat would be such, although if he had had his mind working properly he would’ve known beforehand that it might be hotter further to the south in these late summer months. 

His reception from the other patrons upon entering the bar is not as icy as he’d expected, being a foreigner in a small town, but the chatter of conversation dies down, and he feels the pinpricks of stares on his back as he approaches the bartender and asks, a little self-consciously with his prim little accent, for a glass of water. He perches on the barstool to drink it, and avoids looking around at the other people as their conversations pick back up again. With a desperate hope that the bartender is more understandable – as well as more understanding – Laurent asks where he might find the person the old woman referred to as ‘the painter.’

“You mean Károlos,” the bartender says, and Laurent nods, even though no, that is not who he means. The man gives directions to a specific house in town, and then shoos him out of the bar, which, Laurent thinks, is fairly reasonable. His shoulders are beginning to ache from carrying his luggage everywhere, but he really has nowhere else to put them while he wanders the town. The soreness helps to distract him from anything concerning the whereabouts of Damen; he could merely be a lost tourist at this point, meandering the streets until he’s found by a guide who can bring him back home. The only trouble is that his home is no longer as solidly defined as it once was.

A tall, narrow house looms into view, its curtains dark and grey in all the windows, but the door, painted a bright, eye-watering shade of blue, creaks ajar as Laurent approaches. With a daring that he would never have in Vere, he pushes it the rest of the way open.

The immediate hallway is dim, lit only by the light from the doorway, and by the light from a wider room further along. It’s clean for the most part, but clearly hasn’t been used for a while, smudges of dust here and there on the floors, cobwebs starting to form near the ceilings. Laurent sets his trunk down, and the bag on top, with a quiet only found in in-between spaces, once inhabited and lively, now devoid of life. The hallway opens into a larger room, with a stairway and loft at one end, a large skylight in the roof at double height, so the light seems to waver down to fill the space as soft feathers in a box. There’s such a lack of urgency that it almost surprises Laurent, the feeling of willingness to wait and look.

There’s a section of the room arranged with a small, raised platform, encircled by three sets of easels and stools, a much less grand version of the classroom he saw in Arles. This must be the studio of Damen’s old teacher, he realizes, lips parting. It’s suddenly imperative that he not touch anything, his hand pulling back from where it was drifting to the back of a chair. If there’s any art of _his_ in here, then Laurent should – but no, why would there still be anything, it’s been how many years since Damen would have been a student?

With a clench of his hand he moves to the far side of the room, where several canvases in stretchers are stacked next to each other, all facing the wall. There must be something here, in amongst this person’s flowers, and that person’s milk bottles. Some are only half-finished, just the impressions of faces, dresses, bowls of fruit, standing figures, and some have exquisite detail, but none of them are Damen’s, Laurent is sure of it, just waiting to see something that has that spark of life he imbues into his work, the lines and shades and expressions that come together to depict the reality of a person.

His brow is furrowed with his determination now, the smell of some sort of chemical beginning to waft from somewhere as he moves along the wall, towards the back of the room, steadily looking through the forgotten works, until – 

It’s now only a scrap of a chin and a pair of tranquil brown eyes, hovering, disembodied, above a ruffled collar and tan coat, but it undeniably used to be one of Damen’s paintings. At least, until a knife slashed through it. Laurent frowns more fully, down at the ruined canvas tilted in his hand, wondering first why anyone would slash a painting as good as this one, and second, why anyone would choose to keep it. He’s seen this face before, in some of the other works in here – _lesser works_ , his mind supplies – so perhaps it is a regular model, or even the teacher himself, as was the case in his mother’s school. 

Drifting from out of the old, stagnant air, a memory: the muffled sound of ripping and tearing as Laurent made his hurried and quiet way down the staircase of the Patran house. Laurent closes his eyes, lets the stack of paintings fall back against the wall with a small clatter, a noise that he does not hear above the hum through his own skull, his own heartbeat echoing around him. He shouldn’t have left Damen alone to destroy his own painting again, shouldn’t have left at all. Laurent knows, with an ache deeper than the superficial one in his shoulders, that if they hadn’t kept his own portrait, the one Laurent had been so proud of engineering in his own way, it would have had had the same fate at the hands of its painter. 

With a heaving breath, Laurent escapes out the door again, nudging the door open with his shoulder and banging his way into the street, the terrible dusty street awash in bright sunlight, real, living plants dotting the hillside, a man with a horse right in front of him–

“Whoah, there,” the man says, and it takes Laurent a disorienting second to realise that it’s the horse he’s talking to, spooked by Laurent’s sudden appearance. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Laurent says, truly guilty for startling the duo. He grimaces a little, waiting for the horse to stop pulling so much on the leading rein, calm his steps. 

“You were seeing the painter’s house?” the man asks, while the horse calms. He adds, with a sympathetic raising of eyebrows, “He’s gone now, you know.”

“Yes,” Laurent agrees, before he realises that the man isn’t talking about Damen.

The man’s eyebrows raise further. “He’s _gone_. Dead, from the pneumonia.”

“Oh, I see,” says Laurent, unsure of how to respond to this news, for a person he never knew, other than awkwardly nodding and adopting a serious expression. The horse walks forward a stately couple steps and then is pulled back by the man, providing a welcome distraction. “Your horse is lovely.”

“Of course he is!” The man brightens, patting a hand on the horse’s neck. “He’s the native breed, see how strong.”

Laurent sets down his trunk in the road and approaches, making the movement of his hand towards the horse’s nose as obvious as possible so as not to spook it again. The horse nudges into Laurent’s touch, snorting softly, and so he moves his hand down the horse’s neck, same as the man did, long slow strokes.

“You like horses?” The man asks, and Laurent almost snorts himself. It should be so obvious. “If you’re looking for work, the stud farm half a kilometer out of town is hiring.” He waves his hand down the direction of the road he’d been leading the horse. “Just down this way.”

Laurent ponders this for a moment. He’s not disinclined to stay in Akielos for a while, now that he’s here, and now that his one clue on Damen’s whereabouts has led him to a dead end. For all that Damen had written of his love for Laurent, he’s not so sure that inflicting himself on Damen is the right thing to do at this moment. Perhaps it is the realization he just conceived in the former teacher’s studio, that spectre of destruction that followed Damen and possessed Laurent for those moments they were together, which convinces him to nod to the man, agree to the offering of a job. Perhaps it is the ideal conclusion of his fate, to leave society properly for the working class, likely shovelling out stalls and replacing hay, forming calluses on his palms. Perhaps it is the promise of a consistent steading far enough away from his family to technically stay in written contact without having to physically interact with them. Laurent does snort at this.

Perhaps it is all these things in conjunction, which lead Laurent, aching shoulders and sore feet together, footstep in front of footstep further inwards to a life in Akielos.

\---

“It’s rather, uhm,” Nik starts, gesturing his hands to help him find a word. Damen bites down on his smile.

“Cozy?” Sofia suggests from the parlour.

“I was going to say snug,” says Nik, slyly, depositing his coat on the hall rack currently uncomfortably close to his shoulder. Leodora and Antonia, already corralled by their mother into the parlour, peek their heads around the doorframe and start to bully their father into letting them have cake before lunch. Damen finally unleashes his grin at Nik, who only responds with a wry, exasperated look, letting his daughters tug him into the room. 

Despite only having the cottage for a couple weeks, Damen has already arranged it to nearly his exact wishes. It’s admittedly smaller than his family’s home down south, but as only one person currently lives in it, this size is exactly sufficient for his uses. It came previously furnished as well, although he could probably do with another chair in the parlour, if Leodora and Antonia insist on taking up as much space as possible each time they come over. He hovers by the fireplace instead of arguing, a casual arm resting on the mantelpiece, as if he’s posing for one of his own portraits. 

“To prevent any vicious arguments from forming, and spoiling the good mood of this generously hosted luncheon, it is I who will accept the portrait,” Sofia decrees, holding out her hands in front of her young subjects to stifle any outbursts. Leodora and Antonia settle to either side of her on the sofa, hands clasped in their laps, and Damen shares a look with Nik that makes him let out a bellyful of a laugh at his family’s antics. He reaches through the connecting door to the little library-study and, keeping the face of it hidden from view until the last second, turns it around in his hands.

It’s large, somewhat under two metres tall, a metre and a half wide, and he can feel the weight of it on his boot as the bottom edge rests there, his hands tilting it back to a better angle. Nik edges around to the back of the couch to see more clearly, and positioned like this Damen has no choice but to witness their reaction head-on, in full view. 

He knows what it looks like already; the soft, undefined light from the lanterns and the twilit hour softening and blurring the brightness of the flowers and the girls’ dresses, the shapes of their ruffled collars mimicking the curved petals of the lilies, the usual greens of the foliage dimming into darker blues. It’s possibly the best painting he’s done so far, all context considered, and certainly captures the soft affection he has for his friend’s family, how they’ve taken him as one of their own, let him linger into the evenings in the garden to witness the quiet appeal of summer candlelight.

The girls are stunned, to say the least, mouths hanging open for a minute until suddenly they’re bright and smiling, eyes ablaze, squinting through the joy. Sofia says “It’s so much larger than I expected,” a sense of shocked wonder filling her voice, following through to her hands as she clutches her daughters’ hands to her chest, says “Oh, Damen, it’s beautiful.”

He’s almost afraid to look at Nik, but when he does he finds his friend’s hand firmly covering the bottom half of his face, other arm tucked around his chest, eyes steeled in that particular way Damen has recognized as the look Nik gets when he’s trying not to cry. Damen has to look away from him, then, down at the sloped painting in his hands, the toes of his own shoes just beyond.

“Girls, no touching,” Sofia says gently, Leodora and Antonia crouching down now, onto their knees in front of the canvas. They have just as much determination and gravity in their expressions as they did when they were concocting flower spells in the garden, combined with the lustre of awe and joy at being shown from a wonderful new angle.

As they study the brushstrokes composing their painted faces, Damen dares a glance at Nik again, who seems to have recovered enough to look Damen in the eye with a grateful nod. Damen awkwardly shrugs in a way that successfully conveys that he should come over, and as he transfers his hold on the painting to Nik, he murmurs, “There’s more for you, Sofia,” and ducks out the connecting door.

He’d planned to keep his sketches and watercolours safe ever since his promise to her in the garden, and as he opens one of the long, shallow drawers in his cabinet his fingers graze the bundle of letters tucked in the back.

Damen had– perhaps not given up, but merely drawn inwards. The choice to stop sending the letters hadn’t been an immediate thing, he’d just forgotten to take it with him into town, the first time, and then left it to linger a couple more days on his writing desk the next. The fact that he’d more or less run out of things to say had also come into it, and now he only writes a letter if he thinks of something and really has to put it down in ink. The sketches of– _those_ studies and sketches, from both Patras and before, had been tucked into the bundle as well, and only on the rare occasion that he felt wistful, or he’d had too much wine to drink and felt that twinge of lonely sentimentality, he would pull out the bundle, remind himself of the curves of– of _his_ jaw. The brush of eyelashes. The way he’d felt under Damen’s mouth.

Damen pushes the bundle further back in the drawer any case, swiping the papers for Sofia and shutting the cabinet with quick, practised motions. 

Sofia loves the sketches, even the ones just of the flowers, and he can’t seem to receive enough of her thanks, apparently; by the end of their luncheon Damen is sure he’s going hoarse with how many ‘you’re very welcome’-s, and ‘of course I should have’-s, and the like. As the troupe bundles into the, yes, ridiculously cramped front hallway, Sofia clutches his hands in hers and invokes her gratefulness yet again, and Nik pulls him into a tight hug, delivers a swift and brotherly kiss on his cheek and invites him to a hosted dinner in a couple weeks’ time. Leodora and Antonia remind him that a couple weeks is just enough to do one more picture of them, and Damen contains his laughter to something polite.

Of course by the time the evening of the dinner arrives, Sofia has already had all of the artworks framed, going so far as to hanging the main portrait in a place of pride in the sitting room already. Sofia pulled him away from where he’d been lingering by the door to the garden to introduce him to one of Nik’s ambassadorial acquaintances, smoothing over the hiccup in Damen’s throat at the mention of the country he represented to say how interested the man was in Damen’s portraiture work.

“ _C’est magnifique, ça_ ” the man says in Veretian, thumb dipping under his formal sash in a habitual gesture. “The light on the grass, the flowers, is perfect. Such a soft touch. Posed over several days yes?”

“Yes, a pair of months, in fact,” Damen says, surprised a little at the knowledge the man has about portrait work. The man considers the painting further in silence; an uneasy lump forms in Damen’s throat, the stem of the glass in his hand suddenly feeling very frail. Sofia has already run off to greet more guests, leaving him alone, floundering.

“The eye is drawn everywhere,” the man finally says, tilting a smile towards Damen, to his immense relief. “And yet . . . yet the two girls, the flowers, the lanterns– everything is very still. Such shallow placement, but with much depth. You do very good work.” At the last, he trades his own glass between hands and offers the right one to Damen. It’s slightly strange, to shake after complimenting someone’s art, but Damen supposes– “What are your rates?”

A wide-eyed moment follows, in which Damen hopes he hasn’t embarrassed himself too much with his own shock; to be offered a commission so soon after a relatively minor work, and by a Veretian no less, although one who lives quite close to the border. He stumbles through an appropriate answer, all too aware of the genial lack of payment for the portrait they’re standing under, and the biting lack of payment for the portrait lying in shreds in Bazal.

Damen very nearly finds himself thinking of Laurent, of the way he had been so adamant that Damen continue to paint, to find reliable work after the Arles scandal. He almost thinks of the way Laurent had haggled over produce in the market the same incisive way he’d negotiated pricing with Aliyev. He pushes away the idea of what Laurent might think of the answer he’d just given the ambassador, the low, contained voice saying somewhere in the back of his mind that the number should have been higher. 

As much as he’d pushed those away, the memory of Laurent’s description of a private Veretian salon presses forward when Damen enters, a month later, the warmly lit studio block in Fortaine where his latest work currently hangs, at least until next week. Laurent had talked of crowded walls, bubbly drinks, and lush interiors, more closely surrounded in a way that the Academie gallery had not been. He hadn’t spoken of the art itself, as they’d sat at the little table in the Patran apartment, but Damen had prejudicially supposed it might be of a lesser calibre than that of the formal galleries. This is very much not the case, he thinks, as he accepts a glass of champagne off a passing waiter, gaze lingering along the walls of the first room. 

His own portrait must be further along, as he does not see the painted sheen of a white satin dress, or the rosy-blushed profile of the Veretian ambassador’s young wife, but he does see an impeccable landscape or two, many impressions of dancers and rolling scenery and café scenes, more painted pairs of eyes from every corner of the room on him than real ones. He adjusts the fit of his tie, tries not to look too nervous, and wanders further inwards. 

The second room, in addition to his painting, among many others, holds a single sculpture in the centre of the floor, more fitting to a gallery a hundred years ago than to a modern salon. Perhaps sensing his curiosity, a slightly older woman steps up to his side, an open lace fan hovering over her cleavage. 

“It belongs to the house, so it attends every salon! Don’t worry,” she says good naturedly. “I myself find it most amusing to compare the styles of the visiting pieces to the _eternal marble_ of the god of desire,” her emphasis pronounced with a sly smile. Damen lets out the breath that had been stalling in his throat, and returns it.

“Are you one of the artists tonight? Or just an observer?” She asks.

Damen hesitates, and then kicks himself for thinking of dissembling. He nods, saying, “I have yet to find where, exactly . . . ah, yes, just over there.” He gestures over to the far end of the room, his sitting figure recognizable to him from any angle at this point. The woman considers it from a distance, idly fanning herself. 

Damen shifts in place, suddenly overly aware that it has been nearly a full year since the showing of Laurent’s portrait. He looks over the painting with tired eyes, as he had done many, many times before even showing it to the Veretian ambassador, just in case there was something he missed, some slight he’d made and missed before. This portrait has none of the personality of Laurent’s, he’s sure of it, and yet there is that small piece of doubt which lingers in him still.

“I’m merely an observer at this event,” the woman says, breaking Damen out of his thoughts. “But I may say, as a teacher of the arts, you have painted a marvelously beautiful portrait.” 

Damen smiles more easily. “You teach?” he asks, to cover his relief at her reception.

“A school of the arts, in Arles,” she says. “For young ladies. Have you been to Arles? The artistic community there is excellent.”

Damen’s heart jolts. “Er, yes, I have been. Once,” he says, trying to make it as small of a statement as possible. The woman eyes him as if she’s turning the image of him over in her mind; he feels like a schoolboy again. She releases him from her gaze, however, leaving him with a shallow dip of a curtsy as farewell, to wander through the door to the first room. 

He arrives late back in his cottage that night, ever thankful for the carriage he borrowed from Nik, making sure to send the coachman off with a generous tip. He undresses mechanically, thoughts soothing over and over on how much less hurt he feels from this showing, how far he’s managed to climb along the gradation of recovery from a scandal such as his. How much he wishes he could arrive back to the bedroom and announce his success to a waiting body, before anyone else. How those sketches, and the letters around them, still sit in the back of his desk drawer.

\---

Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t get that much cooler even in the slide from late summer into fall, down in the south of Akielos. Much to the amusement of the other stud hands, Laurent is still exchanging dampened kerchiefs halfway through the heat of the day, pulling on his shirt to make it billow with some kind of breeze. Pallas is always the first one to pull him from the cool shade of the barn when a team is needed for paddock cleaning, and if he doesn’t always do it with the most sparkling little smile then Laurent would have probably managed to talk himself into an escape by now. For some reason, he just can’t bring himself to lie to that smile.

The passage of fall to winter is much more reasonable, bringing with it the necessity for coats and scarfs. The manual labour of moving hay and cleaning stables is almost a relief with the worked-up sweat that comes with it. The spring foals don’t shy away behind their mothers anymore when he approaches the stalls, instead coming forward to get rubbed on the nose, stroked on the neck, search his shoulders for hidden treats. They’d never had real foals at the estate back in Vere, only purchasing yearlings at the very earliest; Laurent loves their curiosity, watches them enjoy each new part of the world. He’d taken to having his mid-afternoon meal out here, a piece of spanakopita, or a hard-boiled egg, and just rest against the wall by the broodmares, listen to all the usually soft and sometimes funny and often calming sounds of the horses, content to be apart from human presence for a short time, until the rest of the stud hands come back in and work starts again. 

Pallas – who had apparently learned Veretian as part of his schooling in a different province, before coming to the south to farm horses – along with a couple of the other men, had taken it upon themselves early in his stay to attempt to acclimatize Laurent to the colloquial Akielon speech. Their lessons mostly take the form of sniggered jokes during the rougher work, when a distraction is welcomed by everyone, and someone eventually turns around to see if Laurent had understood, judging by whether or not he’s making an expression warring between bemused and slightly disappointed. If not, they repeat the joke slowly, with additional, often lewd hand motions, until Laurent catches on, and usually groans with newfound knowledge. The day that Laurent had made one back at them, they’d laughed and jeered, entirely too pleased with their tutelage.

It’s so very different from anything else he’s done with his life, and likely this is why he’s finding so much joy in it. He works for his board and meals and the occasional bit of money to spend on his rare visits into town. He helps the horses, and helps the other stud hands, and all of it helps him find some sort of peace. There’s nothing here that seems to compare to the endless parading of Veretian nobility, the elitism and the facades. The only manipulation is the kind that involves a dirty stall and a shovel, or a stubborn mare and a bucket of apples. There’s likely more to it than Laurent really experiences; there’s town dances and business dealings and drama, but at the end of the day, Laurent thinks as he sits on his thin mattress in the night, most of the horses they breed here end up going to other farmers. And there’s an assuredness and a comfort in that.

Damen only comes to his thoughts in the drifting space between wakefulness and dreaming, his face half-hidden behind the back of a canvas, stepping backwards just out of Laurent’s reach. He hits his hand, _hard_ , on the wall one night trying to touch the man he hasn’t seen in more than half a year now. He ends up falling fully to sleep thinking about lavender powder, when he could possibly have worn it last.

Late supper is the only time when the overwhelming majority of the farm employees gather in one spot, a couple of hands leaving early to start their night shift, more if they’re expecting a foaling soon, and so it’s also the time when the day’s post is handed out. Laurent had not given his family a forwarding address when he left, as he had not known then where he might end up. Even when he’d started boarding at the stud farm, though, he’d left communication with them to fall by the wayside for a moment, to catch his breath, in a manner of speaking. 

A good portion of the trip south had been consumed by thoughts on Maman, her diverging logic on the whole matter something his mind had kept trying to wrap itself around to understand better, like a tongue pressing against the spot where a tooth has gone missing. Nothing short of gunpoint would make him address a letter to his father instead, so his first letter out of Akielos had been to Auguste. A brief note, as letters go; evidence of his continued existence, his new lodgings and explicit instructions not to tell their parents anything. As far as he can tell, his brother has followed along.

The kitchen is serving cured meats and dense cheese on the night Laurent gets a letter from Auguste, and he drops the piece of bread in his hands into his lap – to a surprised bark of a laugh from Pallas – when he reads the very first sentence. He’s sure his jaw drops open too.

“‘I am not sure on the exact whereabouts of your thoughts on the painter who so wronged you with that portrait,’” Pallas reads, after grabbing both Laurent’s arm and the note from his slack hands before Laurent unbalanced himself off the bench completely. He raises an eyebrow at this, and Laurent just nods him onwards. “Something, something . . . uh, ‘as far north as the southern coast of Ladehors, or so I last heard. His popularity in Vere seems gradual but it won’t be long until Arles–’”

“Yes, the next part,” Laurent says, having suddenly regained his voice. He swallows in anticipation of receiving the news again.

Pallas waves a hand to calm him down, finding the next paragraph. “‘Living in Marlas–’ oh Marlas, a great town,” he interjects. “‘A certain Daffodil Cottage.’” Pallas pauses, looks up. “Quite a flowery name for–”

“It’s at least a real, tangible place, though, Pallas,” Laurent says, gripping the table. Pallas sets the letter back down next to his plate. “I don’t know how I’d even get up north to Delpha but it’s– he’s there and people have– have _heard_ of him.”

Pallas runs a hand over his chin, the continued lack of stubble there something the other stud hands tease him for. He’s young, but he’s smart, and has been more of a friend than Laurent has had in longer than he can remember. Pallas had been able to understand more about Laurent’s situation than Laurent had been willing to say aloud, which gives him a good amount of credit in Laurent’s eyes. His gaze drifts to the side momentarily, then snaps back to Laurent.

“I know some youngstock got sold to buyers in Delpha,” he says slowly. “If you asked the boss, or the farm manager, they’d let us go up with the foals on delivery.”

Laurent settles with this information for a week, the old part of him almost waiting for the knowledge to curdle, to turn false, waiting for it to fold back on itself in his mind, step away from his fingers. The more reasonable part of him, grown more and more over the months around the horses and the steady work, simply waits for the right opportunity to bring his interest up with the manager. Perhaps out of solidarity, but likely for a nice change of scene, Pallas volunteers with him, and two weeks later, they roll out of the farmland in horse-drawn vans, Laurent keeping watch over a group of foals as they experience powered movement for the first time.

Despite being off the actual farm, there still seems to be a lot of work involved in the transport of the horses. In the brief moments of quiet rest, Laurent repeats the name Daffodil Cottage over and over, imagining what such a place could be like, how Damen came to live there. He lands on a mental image of a golden field of daffodils, petals all turned to the sun, a thatched roof peeking out of the middle of it all, set above stone walls coated with plaster-white paint. The interior all hand-carved wooden furniture and decorated with suspiciously Kemptian handiwork. A fantasy, all of it; Marlas is a modern city, Damen is a modern man, Laurent is a fool and becoming too sentimental for his own good. 

Dawn is breaking when they make it into the city limits of Marlas, stopping off at a set of fields just outside for a rest day, to water the horses and let them graze. The luxury of the 24-hours in one place means they can unload the youngstock for a bit too, let them run over the misty grass as the light comes up. Pallas slaps a puppy-large hand on his back as he hops down from the van – the way these Akielon boys just hit each other, all the time, out of _affection_ – and sends him a bright, conspiratorial smile.

“Ready to find your painter?” he asks, and Laurent takes his hands out of his pockets, and trudges along the road to the north. ‘ _Your painter,_ ’ Pallas says, ringing clamorous and true in Laurent’s ears.

There’s no thick field of yellow in front, not least because it’s the winter, now, the branches of the front bushes naked without their foliage, the roof a cold set of shingles. The door is made of warm wood, a plain brass knocker set into it, and a small slip of painted wood above announcing in yellow letters the name Daffodil Cottage. No trace of light seeps out from the curtained windows, but Laurent tries the knocker anyways, heart fluttering in his chest. 

A tense moment passes, Laurent straining to hear anything behind the door. It can’t be like this, he thinks, closing his eyes, hand pinching the bridge of his nose. He veers forwards, forehead coming to rest on the chilly wood of the door, mind edging around the idea that he’ll simply just never see Damen again, how the universe must have decided he’d had enough chances, it was time to carry on. He’ll return to the field outside of town, deliver the youngstock, complete the round trip, die of pneumonia like that art teacher, his family will be notified but refuse to cross the border to attend the meagre funeral– 

His hand comes to rest on the door handle, ready to push himself away yet another time, when the door quietly unlatches, folding inwards. Laurent barely manages to catch himself from stumbling over the threshold. He lets out a tired kind of laugh; these Akielons never lock their doors, do they? With a last look to the mist slowly burning off in the steady sunrise, Laurent steps inside.

Every footstep sounding far too loud against the hardwood under his work boots, Laurent follows the hint of light he can now see emanating from the back of the cottage. Through the dim front hall, past a small, narrow staircase, through the low eave of the kitchen door and into a room unmistakeably a painter’s studio, his eyes glance over the daintily decorated tiles along the wall, and the row of windows letting in light from the south, to land on a broad set of shoulders, the slight curve of a back. 

Laurent freezes, the sight of those dark curls gripping him tightly by his gut. The hand beyond makes a few arcing strokes of charcoal over a stretch of canvas. He swallows, sure that the rushing of his heartbeat in his ears can be heard by anyone nearby, and takes a tentative step forward, mouth trying to form any sort of words which might be appropriate. He accidentally scuffs the toe of his boot on a small gap between the floorboards and feels his heart leap up into his throat.

Damen, still deeply ensconced in his work, barely notices, and waves his free hand relaxedly over his shoulder. “Sorry, I thought you were coming to model tomorrow, must’ve lost track of days. You can set your things over there.” Laurent looks to the small couch to his left.

“I–” Laurent rasps, voice suddenly failing. He sees Damen’s shoulders tense, take a measured breath, and turn around.

His eyes are the same rich brown as Laurent remembers, now widened above parted lips like he’s just seen a ghost. Laurent wants to trip over himself to get closer but stays in place, afraid to dispel the timid strands of light between them, starting to spill through the windows.

Instead of the hundred thousand other things he could think of, Laurent says, “Daffodil Cottage?”

“It’s rented,” Damen says, with a tinge of embarrassment. He looks away for a moment, then back. “I thought you had . . .” His sentence drifts off, Laurent shakes his head with a smile.

“I only got one of your letters, I– my family,” he tries to explain, and Damen quickly says, reassures, “I know. I have more, if you want them?”

“Yes,” Laurent says instantly, then, “yes, I do. Want them, rather.”

No one makes a move, both just staring at the other, until Damen blindly sets his piece of charcoal down on the lip of the easel, and offers the same hand forward as he stands. “May I?”

Laurent can’t think of what Damen might possible be asking for, after everything, but he nods anyways, no way for Damen to duck behind the canvas behind him as Laurent reaches out this time. He places his hand in Damen’s, or Damen’s hand comes up to meet Laurent’s, or perhaps both happen, but how could one possibly pay attention to the logistics of holding hands with someone you never thought the world would let you see again. 

Laurent thinks briefly and a little self-consciously about the newly formed calluses on his palms, how this close, Damen can see everything that the lavender powder once covered, and there’s no turning away, no airs, no thinking of leaving, no carving rents or sharp slashes, just Damen’s other hand coming up to cup Laurent’s jaw, and Laurent’s coming up to hold him there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Works referenced:  
> ['Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' by John Singer Sargent](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sargent-carnation-lily-lily-rose-n01615)  
> [ the 1860s dress from the model sketching class](https://fripperiesandfobs.tumblr.com/post/17617250021/evening-dress-ca-1860s-from-the-royal-armory)  
> [Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, astronomer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin)  
> [the portraitist Sargent started his art studies under](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolus-Duran)  
> ['Portrait of Mrs. Cecil Wade' by John Singer Sargent](https://art.nelson-atkins.org/objects/47389/mrs-cecil-wade)  
> [statue in the Fortaine Salon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Psyche_revived_by_cupid%27s_kiss,_Paris_2_October_2011_002.jpg)  
> [sketches by sargent that have the energy of this au](https://hvrd.art/o/306764)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at brigitttt (personal) and/or brigittttoo (rarely used side with writing), and on twitter @brigitttt_ . Comments are much appreciated, thank you for reading! <3


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